Born in 1927, I’d have lived in pre-Confederation Newfoundland.
I’d have just barely avoided having to fight in WWII, since it would have ended just a few months after I turned 18, and I really doubt I’d have lied about my age to enlist. (Especially since it’s entirely possible I’d have lost a whole bunch of relatives in WWI - the Newfies really went through the grinder in that one.)
Assuming we were in Grand Falls (where my father’s family lived), I’d have probably ended up working in the paper mill.
And died in my mid-20s due to the chemicals and dust and my asthma. Fuck.
Assuming St John’s (mother’s family), I’d have likely tried to get a job in the government after graduating from university (just before Newfoundland joined Canada). (Surprising number of my mother’s family do…) Then I’d have lived out a fairly boring life - keep the job, marry, have a gaggle of kids. (Judging by both sets of my grandparents, who I’d be contemporary to, probably 5-10. On the higher side since I was raised Catholic, and probably would have taken that more seriously 50 years ago.) Probably still would have died young, but not as young as if I was in GF.
As I’m the product of technology that didn’t exist in 1934, I wouldn’t exist. Or if I look past that for the sake of the narrative, I probably would have died at birth or shortly after.
Life would have been brief. I would have died at age 7 from complications of peritonitis. Lack of antibiotics would have doomed me. And it would have been at the time of the Spanish Flu. Double whammy.
Being born in 1880, I’d have very possibly (being young and dumb) charged up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt. And then WWI was just around the corner.
This is really confusing for me because I was the first child on my dad’s side born in the US and the fourth on my mom’s side born in the US. Mom came in 1960 and dad came in 1970…something. 74? 78?
My parents definitely wouldn’t have met in the 1930’s in the situation they did in the 80’s. So I’ll do two scenarios from where they originated.
So 1937 in Havana. I would have been educated and not worked but kept busy with volunteering and fundraisers. It would have been a struggle to keep boredom at bay but I would have been encouraged to stay involved in the community. I’d be married by now (25) to another wealthy educated man. I would get to choose him and we’d probably meet through mutual friends, family friends, or in school. I would probably have one child and we would want 3 or 4. I would live three blocks from the beach and would swim every week in the ocean. I would be a city girl through and through. I wouldn’t do any housework, yardwork or cook. I would eat steak and fish most days. I would love my life and my spouse and family, except for the machismo of latin culture, which I dislike in my modern-day real life. I would speak Spanish and not know a lick of English.
In 1937 in the boonies of Kashmir, I’d play by Dal Lake when it wasn’t snowing. I would live on 5-20 acres and hear crickets chirping. I would not be educated, despite being from an upper middle class family. I would be married even earlier, to a man I didn’t love, in an arranged marriage. He would also be a Brahmin and we would care about such things. I’m attractive but also have a mouth on me, so I’m not sure if I would marry someone wealthier or not. I would eat lamb and goat and would never touch beef. I might even be a vegetarian for religious reasons. It would be expected that I be a fantastic cook. I would have taken lots of dance instructions and be quite skilled. I would be fluent in Hindi and Kashmiri and English. I would see Muslim extremism up close and see my family members tortured and raped, given the choice to “kill or convert”.
I would sad and slightly depressed in this situation because overall I don’t like Eastern culture and I have a bit of seasonal affective disorder IRL.
I don’t have to work too hard at this. My own grandmother is fifty years older than me, and we have been close. She’s told me a lot about growing up in her time(she was born in 1904, one year to the day after Kitty Hawk)
Except that while Grandma is still alive at almost 108 years old, I might be an invalid, or dead. I’ve had kidney stone problems that would have made life a lot worse, or dangerous to me. Kind of like my dad. His father died when he had a heart attack, in 1935. Almost fifty years later my father had the same experience, but he’s alive and healthy thanks to angioplasty, clot-busting drugs, and open heart surgery.
Born a handful of days before Black Tuesday, I would have been a baby during the Depression. My parents would have still met on a military base, I suppose, though it likely wouldn’t have been while they were training together. Dad would have been in training for intelligence. Mom would have been a housewife and we would have been quite poor. Most likely, Dad would have jumped to the Navy when I was about four or five just as he did in the 80s. Timing would have put him on the east coast in 1942, and he certainly would have been sent to war.
Given that, Mom and I would almost certainly have moved in with her mother. Her father would have been long dead and her brother would have likely been drafted. I probably would have gone to high school in Wisconsin. I probably would also have been rather profoundly abused – much as I love my mother and her mother, they weren’t exactly the most supporting folks before antidepressants. I would probably have had at least as much trouble fitting in in high school, but with two very independently-minded parents and my own determination I probably would have gone to college if for no other reason than to escape my parents. That is, unless I’d found a boyfriend in high school I wanted to marry.
If I did marry, it’s quite likely that whoever I ended up with would have been much like my first boyfriend – sweet, gentle, bright, creative, and closeted. We’d probably have a couple of kids. Finding out that he was gay after we were married probably would have hurt more than it did when I actually found out, and that was pretty shattering. We’d have stayed married, of course. I probably would have granted him a ‘friend’ so that he wouldn’t be unfulfilled. I’d have stayed faithful, most likely, and found some other way to escape into fantasyland.
Like so many others in this thread, I would have been the right age to serve at the time of WWII. I shudder to think what it must have been like at Dieppe.
Born in 1934 to a single mother in poor-as-dirt Mississippi. With a lack of options, I likely would’ve married the first boy I started “going with” in high school, and quite possibly never would’ve left my small town.
It’s now 1961. I probably have two or three kids. I spend a lot of my time caring for them and my husband, cooking and cleaning, and listening to the radio. I never went to college or traveled the country/world.
I would have seen the invention of the car, the airplane, the radio, the TV, air conditioning, and the computer, assuming I survived WWI. Life would have rapidly gotten much better.
I wouldn’t have happened. Dad would probably have been killed in WWI. If not, I’d have done WWII as a rifle holder. Since I am by nature a spineless coward I would probably have drowned in my own urine en route to Normandy.
Born January 28, 1906, in small town Wisconsin, where my father was a veterinarian specializing in dairy cattle. My mother was the secretary in his clinic.
Born in 1912, in Germany, to an electrical engineer and an office worker/housewife.
I’d possibly have become a vacuum tube geek in the 1920s. Probably also have studied electrical engineering. Taken a lot less time with it as university was expensive then.
Would probably not have become a Social Democrat as the party was much more working class then. Some kind of middling liberal, probably.
At age 20, change of government. I’d very probably not have minded much and kept my head down (in talks over the last few decades, with close friends and my SO, we invariably estimated that our insight and courage would very probably not have extended to doing anything against Nazi rule).
3 days after my 27th birthday, WWII starts. I get drafted, and depending on blind chance there is a dramatic fork here:
I either get killed (p about 1/4), get badly maimed in body or soul or stay POW in the USSR for years, returning to a Germany where I am behind everyone. Bad for the rest of my life.
or by chance I make it through relatively unscathed. My parents’ town stayed unbombed throughout the war and was captured without a fight. In that case I’d have got it made: able-bodied men in high demand, a booming economy, more so since the beginning of the Korean war, and very important, at least to me: I am a young-ish man in a society where a lot of my male contemporaries are dead, crippled or still POW. From tales of people who were young men then, it was a very nice time for men. Would have helped my romantic prospects no end.
Of course now in 2012 I am dead.
Only, if my grandparents and parents had been born 50 years earlier they’d never have met. My paternal grandparents met in 1912 when people flocked to see a zeppelin visiting their region - would not have happened in 1862. My father moved to the city where he met my mother as a result of being a naval engineering cadet in WWII and, as a result, later an electrical engineer - would not have happened 50 years earlier.
