1. #1
    I think alot of the members here are over 50 years old myself included and reading about the last ww1 combatant passing got me thinking about peaple i knew family included that were born before 1900 hundred. my great grand mother was 100 when she died in 1976.another was 98 died 1968.I thought today i would try to tell my son about how different these peaple were from us today but i could not find the words.
    those of us that knew peaple before the airplane was invented and the lightbulb was common place are privlaged to have known them they had a whole different mindset that cannaot be translated to todays young.
    moral values meant somthing then hard work was the norm.
    just sad to hear off the last ww1 vet passing rip.
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  2. #2
    danjama's Avatar Banned
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    I agree with your sentiment.

    Try and teach this to your son though, and as many others as in your power - the young are more understanding than you may realise.
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  3. #3
    I know what you mean about trying to tell kids about folks I knew who were alive before the automobile and airplane was invented. I told some young folks in their early 20s a few years back about how one of my relatives told me about when he moved to East Texas from Oklahoma when he was a kid with his family back in the late 19th century. I tried to emphasize the point about his entire family making the trip with a team of oxen pulling a wagon carrying everything they owned, and that he rode a horse most of the way. I told them about one of my dad's aunties telling me about how her father got slammed into a tree while riding a mean horse back at the turn of the 20th century, got his spleen ruptured, and died several days later where there was nothing they could do for him at the time due to medicine not having progressed yet to the point they could save him. I told them other stories I heard from folks who lived back then, but none of it really seemed to make a mark. Maybe it's because they really don't have anything to reference this stuff to, so it's all abstract dry 'history' to them.

    I know I ranted about this very same stuff here on the forum in the past where I feel really lucky to have known, listened and learned from folks who lived back then. Unless they writes their memoirs or teach somebody else, once that knowledge is gone, it's gone forever with really no certain way to know exactly how it was. Making educated guesses about how it really was is the only thing folks in the future can do.

    Hey Sakai, you're right though about they had a different mindset about most things way back then.
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  4. #4
    My grandma passed away in January of this year at 94 years of age. She told us many stories of her youth growing up in Chicago and then in Northern Wisconsin. Growing up during the Great Depression, her years on the farm and so forth. And we think we have it rough
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  5. #5
    horseback's Avatar Senior Member
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    Both my grandfathers were born before the turn of the century, and both had a lot of interesting 'yarns' about growing up and working back in the day; my paternal grandfather served in France as a maintenance sergeant with a fighter squadron that flew Nieuports and Camels (he used to tell a ridiculously funny story about trying to teach English to a French mule that they used for hauling parts around), and my maternal grandfather was a foreman for Goodyear who helped build Corsairs during WWII.

    But the best story of all involves my paternal great grandfather, who passed away in 1965 at the ripe old age of 107:

    In Christmas of 1960, my family was driving across country before flying to my Dad's USAF assignment in Britain, and had stopped at Grandpa's house for the holiday and one last hurrah with the whole family. All the kids (my siblings and cousins under 16) were all watching 'Gunsmoke' on the B&W TV in the basement when Great Grandpa came down with my Dad & uncles to join us.

    He watched with us for about ten minutes and then remarked that Chester (the deputy played by Dennis Weaver) sounded "...just like President Lincoln."

    Well, the TV was turned off immediately and we all (including my father & uncles) learned that Great Grandpa had been at the dedication of the cemetary at Gettysburg and actually heard the President deliver the Gettysburg Address in person while sitting on one of his older brothers' shoulders. Apparently, either a close family friend's son or one of Great Grandpa's other big brothers had been lost in the battle there, serving with The Union (and when Great Grandpa said it, you heard the words capitalized).

    I was only seven, so parts of the tale got a bit muddled, but I do know that three of Great Grandpa's six (surviving) older brothers were killed in the Civil War (he was the second to last son of 8 boys and 3 girls who survived to their teens; I think he said that his parents lost at least four children before those kids reached age 10), and a fourth one lost a leg in the war and 'died young a few years later'. I recall that he also said that one brother 'took off for the West' and disappeared in the 1870s.

    What I found interesting was that while he was talking about his childhood and the big brothers he clearly worshipped as a little boy, he dropped his standard southern Ohio accent and spoke with a ghost of the English accent that his childhood household had used(his father had brought them over from Cornwall in the mid 1850s).

    We make a point of sharing that story with our own kids--as the oldest, I've made sure that my nieces and nephews got it from my Dad because we consider it part of our family heritage.

    cheers

    horseback
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  6. #6
    leitmotiv's Avatar Senior Member
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    Lincoln sounded just like Dennis Weaver's Chester. Damn if that isn't the most interesting bit of info I've seen in ages. It made him come alive for me like nothing before. Thanks, hoss!
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  7. #7
    GoToAway's Avatar Senior Member
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    I never knew either of my grandfathers. I know they both survived WW2, but apparently drank themselves to death in their early 30s. I only know one of their names because my father is a Jr.
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  8. #8
    Remember twenty, maybe 30 years younger.
    Most didn't care, to listen.
    Not that most don't actually care, but life alone for them is foremost.

    Keep the stories alive, an in 20 to 30 your words will be heard.

    Write it down, record it, what ever it takes.

    I regret technology is so easy now. If only we would of had it at our finger tips when our Grand parents were alive and so willing to tell the tales.
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  9. #9
    VW-IceFire's Avatar Senior Member
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    Originally posted by T_O_A_D:
    Remember twenty, maybe 30 years younger.
    Most didn't care, to listen.
    Not that most don't actually care, but life alone for them is foremost.

    Keep the stories alive, an in 20 to 30 your words will be heard.

    Write it down, record it, what ever it takes.

    I regret technology is so easy now. If only we would of had it at our finger tips when our Grand parents were alive and so willing to tell the tales.
    You bet. I'm younger than many here (in my late 20s) and years ago we taught my grandfather how to use a word processor - he translated his wartime journal and we now have an electronic and printed record which is just a fantastic piece of family history now preserved.
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