Then I wonder if she had any experience with survivors of the 5 corners battles which was depicted in “Gangs of New York”. Granted that was mostly dealing with the Irish.
That would have been an interesting thing to ask my other grandmother, who had an Irish maiden name, despite being Jewish. One several-greats-ago grandfather on my father’s mother’s side (the same side that was here during the revolution, but different branch) was Irish. My drop of goyisher. He got excommunicated from the RCC for nun-napping, and then eventually converted to Judaism, which was a really unusual thing for a gentile to do, but he was ticked off at his family and the church. My ggg(however many)grandmother, his wife, was disowned by her family, and I didn’t know anything about it until I was a teenager, but apparently I had some family who lived in the ante-bellum South, who weren’t exactly people one would be proud of. We’re not related to Judah Benjamin, or anything (baruch haShem), but I guess I had ancestors on both sides of the Civil War. Yippee. At least my direct ancestors had the sense to leave the South and go back to NYC before the war actually broke out, so anyone I’m related to on the gray side would have been strictly a cousin or something.
Anyway, my grandmother hid behind her maiden name at one point to get a job from someone who wouldn’t have hired a Jew, and probably assumed she was Catholic.
I had my life threatened once, because I was Jewish, and a friend who wasn’t Jewish immediately stood up for me; it was scary, and stands out in my mind because things like that don’t regularly happen, in spite of subtle things, or just weird things, like being told I’m the only Jewish person someone has ever met. But it was just a couple of generations ago that people put up with overt anti-Semitism in the US, and only one generation before me, that the Holocaust happened. Some might say two, except that it happened to children, and those children are my aunt, and parents of my friends.
An entire generation has grown to majority (18, here) since it ended.
I was having to explain to my daughter how her mom and I would have been criminals for being married, or even just dating, as late as 1990.
I have thoughts like the OPs a lot. It’s sobering to think that my grandparents were born before the Wright brothers made their first flight…yet my grandmothers got to see men walk on the moon.
H.P.Lovecraft wrote once that when he was a boy he’d met a man who was around when men still wore those Knee Breeches and silk stockings.
As my junior high history book pointed out, all of human civilization is only a few hundred generations old, at most.
I have an almost 8-year-old, and I’m 47, which makes me older than almost all his friends’ parents, and a lot older than some of them. I don’t personally remember a lot of diseases for which there are vaccines, but my parents do: I had an aunt I never met, because of a disease for which there is now a vaccine (I used to think the disease was pertussis, but from a description I read a couple of years ago that my grandmother wrote, I think it might have been Hib epiglottitis. My father survived Hib and the mastoiditis some kids get. My mother survived measles and mumps, and both my parents remember polio summers. My aunt had rickets from the malnutrition and lak of sunlight of being in hiding during the Holocaust, and wore leg braces, which made people think she survived polio, so she knew that stigma.
My brother got sent home from college with chicken pox for two weeks, just a couple of years before the vaccine was on the market. I had a friend in college die of meningoccocal meningitis. There’s a vaccine for it now. I caught attenuated pertussis, either by chance (most likely), and it was attenuated because of the vaccine, or (my mother’s theory) from the shot itself-- but my mother didn’t even care if I got it from the shot. It was miserable, but it lasted a day. She knew what real pertussis was like.
Vaccines were taken very seriously in my childhood, because my parents knew those diseases. There was little comforting and no bribing over a mere shot. My mother wished she could go back and get a shot instead of measles or mumps. If I didn’t get those shots, I could die, and that wasn’t rhetoric, or hyperbole.
So I take my son’s vaccines very seriously. So does my husband, who is a biologist and hospital lab tech. He hears stories about the occasional unvaccinated kid who is admitted through the ER with measles pneumonia, or pertussis, and he works directly with cancer patients, who are immuno-supressed, and really depend on herd immunity.
I want to scream, or shake people, when they think the shot, or the mild side effects, like a low grade fever for a few hours and a sore arm, are worse than the disease, because literally the only experience some very young parents have with vaccine-preventable illnesses is seeing an iron lung in a museum, and the episode of the Brady Bunch where all the kids had the measles. Hell, even if your kid has the worst possible side effects, like febrile seizures, or an allergic reaction that requires a trip to the ER, it’s better than polio.
I think before any parent refuses a vaccine, they should be forced to watch interviews with long-term polio survivors (there are still about 40 iron lung users in the US), people with birth defects from rubella (or their parents, since some people are very badly affected), and see a child with post-measles encephalopathy, a fatal complication of measles that can show up anywhere between 6 months to 6 years post infection.
I’m glad that people don’t live in fear, but they’re living in ignorance instead, and that’s really bad.
I am old enough to have clear memories of news reports on the First Gulf War.
When my dad was a little boy he saw D-Day soldiers training.
When my grandfather was in his teens he would have been hearing about the Second Boer War.
My grandmother chortled at a old woman on a TV sitcom’s giving sick children kerosene. She’d had to take it herself. What she referred to was the 1918 Influenza Pandemic.
Which also meant that she had been a girl while the Romanov’s were still on the throne, three years younger than Tsarevich Alexis. Through Ivan the Terrible’s grandmother, he claimed descent from the Byzantine emperors, who were an offshoot of the Roman Empire.
Wait, your dad was alive on D-Day, but the first war you remember is the Gulf War? My father was a teen on D-Day, and I was born during Vietnam-- I could have served in the Gulf War. Was your father in his 40s when you were born? Nothing wrong with that-- my father was 41 when my brother was born-- it just seems like a long gap. But maybe my math is bad, or you were a teen during the Gulf War, and your phrasing just makes it sound like you were just done with potty training.
He was born in '41, I was born in '81, his dad was born in '89 (1889 
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I was 8 when it started and 9 when it concluded. I remember the Troubles from before that but that was going on my whole life up until then.
My mother in law survived Stalin’s rule in Ukraine and WW2, and imigrated to Canada in the '50s.
Listening to her stories of growing up in the Soviet empire is an experience. Like how she & the kids around her were given candies - a rare treat - and promised more for informing on parents.
If you go backward from my birth as much as I’ve lived, you’d be at the point the US entered WWII.
I know the Tyler trivia, and it still breaks my brain.
You don’t really have to reach out and touch someone too many times to get back to the creator of the largest contiguous empire the world has even seen. It’s possible for you to touch someone who touched someone who touched someone who touched someone who touched someone who touched someone who touched someone who touched someone who touched someone who shook Genghis Khan’s hand (fun to imagine the last guy in the chain wearing a joke hand buzzer).
I was 13 years old when my grandparents and I watched Neil flub his big line on the moon after he and Buzz flew over 1.2 billion feet. Pop-pop looked at Nana and joked, “So they went a little further than the originals, big deal!” They were about 13 years old when Wilbur and Orville flew 120 feet on Kill Devil Hill.
Nana and Pop-pop were old enough to have appreciated Edison’s moving picture Kinetoscope premiere at the Chicago World’s Fair (if they lived in Chicago instead of Philadelphia, they probably would have). Regrettably, they lived long enough to also see BJ and the Bear premiere on TV.
I’m just about 50. I’ll be dead in twenty years. 
This is why immortality ain’t all it’s cracked up to be!
Yeah, but look at my grandmother (who is still alive and relatively healthy); she was born three years before the 19th amendment passed, and lived to vote for a woman for president, even if it was just in the primary. (And is proud that she lived to see a black president, because since the 1950s, she had been telling people it would happen some day, and there had been people telling her she was wrong, some right up until about the year 2000-- even if getting to see a black president was at the expense of a woman.)
My grandmother is still hoping she’ll get to see a woman president in her lifetime, or at least a woman vice president-- but not a Republican. (That’s a quote.)
Hence the bottle of arsenic we found next to dearly departed Nana and Pop-pop sitting in front of that idiotic smiling chimp hamming it up on their TV set.
Too bad, really. That show was one of the late 70s harbingers of 80s TV-- the lowest point in US television so far. But it got better. It got better in the 90s, plateaued (Look Mom! 4 vowels!) for a while, and IMHO, is improving again.
But the 80s were scary. There’s a reason you can buy so little of it on DVD, but so much of the 60s and 70s is available.
It’s probably just as well. I was in high school and college in the 80s, and didn’t need the distraction.
I am the youngest of my siblings at 61. My older brother was born in 1938, my sisters in 1940, 1942 and 1945.
There really were three social revolutions in the 20th century. First along came World War I, which was much more of a big deal in Europe than America, but still. Then the depression and World War II. That mixed things up, and the definitive end to the war marked a new social order and everyone was glad as hell to have jobs and prosperity. Then along came the 60s, which overthrew the “old” social order of the 50s, which was really only a decade old at that point.
But the reason the 50s seemed so old in the 60s was the lack of continuity in the 50s to previous decades. The depression and the war just erased the past. And so to kids growing up in the 60s the 50s were how it “always was” despite everything being brand new.
But we haven’t had any comparable social revolutions since. Thirty years ago was 1984. That was a long time ago, and even though we’ve had some technological change and social evolution since 1984, it’s nothing like the change in the 30 years from 1954 to 1984. The people in the 50s lived in a different country. And between 1954 and 1924, forget it. That’s like living on a different planet.
Before World War I, you’d have to go back to the American Civil War to find a comparable era of radical change, at least here in the US.
I agree with your proposition with one minor exception; I’d delay revolution #1 from “World War I” till “The Roaring Twenties” (aka The 60’s, Part I). Man, those flappers were the bee’s knees!