I was born for realz in 1970, so for this thread I’d have been born in 1920.
I’d have probably died in WWII. If I had survived it, I’d have used the GI Bill to go to college. Probably would have gone into journalism and gotten a job as a beat writer for the local rag. Snore.
Born in 1912, daughter of a non-commissioned naval officer and a housewife in lovely orange-growing Ventura, California. I would have been vaguely aware of WWI and spent my adolescence yearning to be old enough to take part in the Jazz Age, which officially ends when I am 17, dropping me into the Depression.
I pack oranges with my sisters to pay for a bookkeeping/secretarial course and go to work for a local business owner. I marry another small business owner at 25 and work in the family business, have my first child at 27 and my second is born shortly after my husband is shipped off to training after the entry of WWII. He is killed in the Pacific two years later and I continue running the family business.
A couple years after the end of the war I remarry a second cousin of my husband who I like and who has the sense and know-how to help the business grow. We have one child together but become rather estranged, our romantic interest in each other never having been very strong. Still, we show a united face to the world and maintain a polite and cordial home for the children. Whatever he gets up to on his buying trips a couple times a year is his business, so long as none of it follows him home.
He dies in the late '50’s which is kind of a blessing since he is spared seeing his oldest stepdaughter throw all his values to the wind and become first a hippie, then a radical feminist. I am outwardly disapproving but secretly envious, remembering back to my teenage years when I wanted to throw my parents values out the window and become a flapper.
Coming from a long-lived family on both sides, I only died a couple years ago.
I’d have been born in 1932 in a small town in Tennessee. My mother would have been the single mother of two as my father would have left her for another woman while she was pregnant with me. I would have grown up even poorer than I did in the present time, and would have missed WW II by a couple years. I’d’ve turned 18 right before the Korean War though, so I might have been drafted for that. If I was drafted, I think I might have found a wife in Korea and returned to the US with her.
Back home, I’d have used the GI Bill to get an education and gotten some boring office job, much like today. Probably in manufacturing?
I’d be my current age right around the Civil Rights era and being married to an Asian woman in the South in this timeline (and a big supporter of women, POC, and queer rights in the real timeline), I think I would be supportive of equal rights, though quietly.
I’d be 80 today if I were still alive, though I’d probably be long dead before now.
Jesus, I think I got the nicer life.
Come to think of it, would I have died of pneumonia in 1919?
1908 - Perhaps I’d have been one of the 60% that made it into my teens.
Almost certainly have been brought up in a workhouse and then possibly inducted into the military during the mid '20’s as a boy soldier/seaman or possibly indentured to a factory. Given my talent for machinery I would probably gone on to some sort of maintenance role.
In the military I’d have learned a trade probably as one of the new electrical artificers.
I would, have probably done my time in the military but been kept on as a senior NCO - WW2 despite my age, trade skilled leaders were needed to keep the slowly modernising forces rolling and train the huge influx. There’s a chance I would have been evacuated from Dunkirk and then spent most of the war in a training role, but that’s not a guarantee - could have also ended up being deployed either to North Africa trying to keep unreliable machinery going or to India.
If I’d been a factory tradesperson, I would probably volunteered just as most of my contemporaries, however I’d have been getting on in years a little. Meantime I would have been living in one of those newly built council estates, the city put up. These were too expensive for the non-skilled to rent, and they would still be living in the endless back-to-back terraces around the town centre and much closer to their workplaces.
My house isn’t so bad, but the roads are mostly unmade except for the one that takes me by tram to work. If I’m fortunate maybe I will get to be the supervisor, my education isn’t up to middle management but I am proud that my son goes on to night school and goes on to better things - It looks to me like things are steadily improving not only for me but for all those like me. Who knows, maybe someday in the future someone in the family will pass their entry exams and get into one of the grammar schools and even to university - there’s a bright future for the male line.
For the girls, there are are opportunities to go into the new National Health Service instead of being one of the ‘factory lasses’ or perhaps become a teacher.
I didn’t make it much into the 1970’s - I smoked, as did all my contemporaries but I had a pretty good run. My hearing was going long before then - nobody wore hearing protection, and if it hadn’t been the cigs then it would have been the asbestos - no-one took safety seriously back then.
I’ve achieved a lot from my poor start in life and set a good example to my offspring and grandchildren, they’ve all done well, except for one - as always. He got pretty drunk at the funeral, which wasn’t a sombre affair. I’m going to try out one of the fairly new crematoriums, the cost of burial is getting too much and the money can go to better use. Even after life, we Yorkshire folk tend to be careful with money.
30% chance of death, I think.
I’d have been born in 1896. Since I was born allergic to milk (they tried mother’s milk, cows’, and goats’), giving me horrible rashes, and in 1896 there was no alternative, I would probably have starved to death in a few weeks. As it was, my mom’s doctor knew someone who was working on a new product (which turned out to be Similac) and was able to get hold of some for me, so I didn’t starve.
Actually, I’m pretty glad I was not born in a time when if I lived I’d have been unable to go to college, among other things. I don’t think being pushed into marriage and forced to be a homemaker and a mother would have been very happy times for me!
Probably dead very shortly after birth. :eek: 
Born in real life in 1972, I was premature – I have been repeatedly told over the years by my mother, with a grin on her face for some reason ;), that I looked like a dead chicken. I spent a fair amount of time in an incubator.
Born in 1922: what incubator? :smack:
(Yes, the incubator was invented before 1922, but it wasn’t adopted [pun intended] widespread until significantly later. The “live babies!” incubator display at the 1933-34 Chicago World’s Fair was at least partly an effort to bring the whole “premature babies can be saved” idea to the public’s attention.
So I would have had a fighting chance. That’s good!
I don’t know if my father would have had the same career path back then, as there was no NASA (not that he worked for them) and no radio. We probably would have stayed in Iowa, or more likely Kansas. I would have had relatives around all the time. I probably would have worked on my great grandmother’s farm. I would have been 19 during the great dustbowl.
I prefer the life I got instead.
Born in 1911. I would have been graduating high school and looking for a job just as the Great Depression hit.
I would have been born in 1919. Living in the Bay Area, I would have had access to school, at least though high school. My dad would have worked in emerging technologies like electronics. My mom would have been a housewife, whatever was typical for the time period.
I might have gone to college (one of my grandmothers did). Or I might have gotten married at 18 (my other grandmother did). I would have been 22 when Pearl Harbor was struck, so might have joined the WACS or WAVES, if I was an “old maid”.
You can come work on my great grandmother’s farm!
Born 1912, and my parents would be International Bible Students, as Jehovah’s Witnesses were formerly known. I would be six when war hysteria would jail members of my faith, and I imagine things would be particularly dicey for my foreign born parents, especially my non-citizen German-born mother. I don’t know if deportation would become an issue, but Mom refuses to become a U.S. citizen because she feels the loyalty oath conflicts with her faith. My twenty-nine-year old dad would refuse military service which would add fuel to the fire.
On our side, oddly enough, would be the mayor of Chicago, Big Bill Thompson, whose stance on the Great War earned him the nickname “Kaiser Bill”. Perhaps he would only be pandering to Chicago’s huge German voting bloc, but my folks’ plight might make an interesting human interest story for him to plug his “dissolution of the British yoke of oppression” views, which always was such a hit with Irish voters as well. Fun times.
But perhaps everything would blow over, and I would grow up to working age when the Great Depression hits. Being single, I would have an easier time finding work than married women, who are urged to stay home and not take jobs away from their menfolk. I think I would be disappointed at the backseat that women’s rights take during the Depression, as I can remember the thrilling Progressive times when women won the right to vote, shortened their skirts, and bobbed their hair, and I was too young then to participate. I think I would have felt I missed out on something there. Much the way I feel about missing out on the early seventies Women’s Lib marches and so forth.
I think I would’ve spent my life more trim and fit than I am now, since chores were much more physical then. There was less junk food, and people walked from place to place more. Getting out of the house was more important to me, because for years there were no TV’s and computers to keep me home. I’d go to the movie theaters and the parks way more often.
Since I’m fitter, and a non-smoker, (thank you Witnesses, for that anyway.) and I also have long lived relatives, I think I’d live a long life. I don’t know if I would’ve been here for my 100th birthday two weeks ago, but it’s possible.
Killed in infancy by asthma.
Born 1922, 17 when WW2 starts. Probably KIA in North Africa or Papua New Guinea.
Born 1903. Probably would have died of pneumonia in 1906. If I managed to survive that, my childhood would have been spent trying to amuse myself while my mother sought some sort of factory work to support us.
Probably would have remained a spinster since a great proportion of the adult male population was killed in The Great War.
Hmm. Born in 1931, I would have been too young to serve in World War II, but old enough to somewhat understand it in the early 40’s. My father would have been too old to be drafted, I think, so he would have probably been working at a plant of some kind, manufacturing war material. My mother would have spared no effort toward my education, as she did, expecting me to become a doctor, lawyer, or scientist of some sort; with the advent of the nuclear age, they probably would have had hopes for me becoming a nuclear scientist.
I would have been just the right age to get drafted into the Korean War, though. Assuming I got through the training and survived the war, I think I would have liked the military. I’d have stayed in, and gone on to be career military, probably putting in effort to become an officer, so I’d probably be an officer by the time Vietnam rolls around, and I’d stick with it until I retire, which would have been in the 90’s/early 2000’s. Not sure exactly what the usual retirement age for career officers is, honestly.
Assuming I wasn’t killed in wars, or maimed or otherwise injured, my life would be more successful by objective external metrics, at least. I wonder if the person I would be in that life would be happier than the person I am now, though…
Born in Michigan in 1904, to a botanist who had spent a good chunk of the preceding decade in Mexico. (Wonder what he would have been looking for in Mexico in the 1890s…) Too young for WW I, though if I went into the Navy at the same age I would have had nine years in by Pearl Harbour.
Born in 1942, dead from child abuse by 1950.