By that I mean, what person that you have met had the earliest date of birth? It would be someone who was very old when you were very young.
In my case, it was my great grandmother, who was born in 1866, one year after the US Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Her mother, at the age of eight, walked barefoot from Omaha, Nebraska to the Salt Lake Valley of Utah in 1847. I knew my great grandmother until her death at age 99 in 1965, when I was 11.
My Uncle George, who was the son of a Civil War veteran, was born in 1875. His dad was my 3 x great grandfather. I met him first in 1958 when I was less than 1 year old, and visited with him at least yearly until his death in 1971. When I visited, I’d stay with him and his wife Aunt Nettie in their house which lacked electricity and running water. Kerosene lamps, hand pump in the kitchen, outhouse out back. We’d play dominos, carom, and crokinole and listen to a wind up Victrola playing old time music. Aunt Nettie would cook from scratch on her wood burning stove in the kitchen. Such memories I have of them.
When I was in high school (early 1980s), I was a member of a service organization, the Key Club, which is a junior branch of the Kiwanis Club. We would do various activities, such as visiting residents of nursing homes, and volunteering at charitable events.
Anyway, at one of the nursing homes we would visit, there was one resident, Jennie, whom we all got to know, in part because she loved to tell stories to us; at that time, she was about 102 years old, which would have put her birthdate somewhere around 1880. (This also made her 15 to 20 years older than any of my grandparents, who were the oldest of my relatives whom I’d ever met.)
My grandmother Elona, who was born in Kentucky in 1882, the daughter of an Ohio River steamboat captain whose father ferried goods for the Union during the Civil War. She died in 1975 (when I was 28) at the age of 93. I never met her father (b. 1858 in Ironton, OH), who also died at age 93 in 1952 when I was five.
My grandmother, born in 1888. What’s curious is that she was eight years older than her family thought she was, and she had changed her name (she originally had the same first name as her husband). No one knew this until well after she had died. Her gravestone has her assumed name and birth date.
My Great Grandmother was also born about then. We took her to Disneyland for her 98th and she had a ball (late 1950s). They treated her like a VIP almost.
My great-grandfather was born in 1874 in Illinois, and died in 1961 in Oregon when I was almost 11. I am surprised on looking this up that he was only 87 when he died, I thought he was over 90. My great-grandmother, his wife, was also born in 1874 and told us about coming to the west coast in a covered wagon as a child. She was almost 96 when she died, the oldest among the relatives I know about.
On my mother’s side two of my grandmother’s older siblings were still alive for me to meet when I was about 5. They would have been born right around the Civil War, thus beating my grandfather on my father’s side, who was born in 1882.
I was about five years old when my father had us visit with the people who were on a float in a parade in our small town. They were the four or so local surviving veterans from the war. The Spanish-American War. They would have been born in the 1860s or 1870s probably.
One of my paternal great-grandmas. She was born in Calabria, Italy in 1883 and came to the US around 1912. She died a month shy of her 90th birthday in 1973. I was 12. She was in the US for over 60 years and yet could barely speak any English. She also couldn’t read or write.
