Have you ever thought about what your recent ancestors lived through?

[Road Runner]

I sometimes think about my grandmother who was sharp as a tack until she died at the age of 92.  She lived from 1901-1993.  As a child, she lived without electricity, running water and indoor toilets.  There were no movies, no phones, no cars, no planes, no radio, no TV.

She lived though a lot:  WWI,  the 1918 Flu Epidemic, the Great Depression, WWII, the development of atomic weapons and power, the Cold War, space travel and men on the moon, and, near the end of her life, the development of the personal computer and the internet.  I wish now I had engaged her more and talked much more with her about her life-long experiences.  But I was an idiot.

[shootingstar]

49 minutes ago, Road Runner said:

I sometimes think about my grandmother who was sharp as a tack until she died at the age of 92.  She lived from 1901-1993.  As a child, she lived without electricity, running water and indoor toilets.  There were no movies, no phones, no cars, no planes, no radio, no TV.

She lived though a lot:  WWI,  the 1918 Flu Epidemic, WWII, the development of atomic weapons and power, the Cold War, space travel and men on the moon, and, near the end of her life, the development of the personal computer and the internet.  I wish now I had engaged her more and talked much more with her about her life-long experiences.  But I was an idiot.

My mother, as a child recalls sleeping on a stone pillow/head rest in her village in China. She  recalls as a teen stirring huge pot of food over kindling fire for her big family.

I think one of the reasons why there are very rare photos of my parents' lives and family members:

• money had to be focused somewhere else. Any rare photos we have, were taken in photo studio and of them ..as adults. Not children. I honestly believe none of their families had a camera/no tv. Maybe radio somewhere.
• they grew up when China was undergoing major civil war internally (Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists, Mao's communists and marauding gangs stealing,  etc.) and against the Japanese 1930's-early 1950's. survival was  key.

For instance, my maternal grandmother died from dental surgery in mid 1960's. Her sons had to wheel her by cart to doctor.. No car. Remember  cars widespread didn't become part of mainland  Chinese household until late 1980's onward, when economy became abit more "capitalist", ie. people owning their major assets.  Really any relatives living in North America were seen as rich.

Both paternal and maternal grandparents never came to North America. So my parents each immigrated..it really was good-bye..forever. Air flight in 1950's to 1960's still very expensive to fly overseas.

[Mr. Beanz]

My grandfather came from Mexico in 1908 on a work visa. Earning his citizenship. He worked at construction then a nursery most his life. As an adult, lived in a dirt shack with a couple kids. Saved money, built a modern house with a shower and all the goods. Built a second house next to the first one. 

I think I would have loved that life. Old fashion days, work your ass off and save money. Get into a fight, punch the other guy and it is over. Nowadays, too many politicians and legalities involved.

[Rattlecan ★]

My grandparents were all born in the 1890s.

My maternal grandparents moved west to Saskatchewan where Mom was born in 1932.

Their farm literally blew away in the dust bowl. They moved back to Ontario in 1938.

My paternal grandparents were old order Mennonites Who weathered the depression very well as they were mostly self sufficient. For them the thirties were just another decade that they were ten years older at the end of.

All but my paternal grandmother died within a couple of years in the mid seventies. She died in 1994 at the age of 97.

[AirwickWithCheese]

34 minutes ago, Road Runner said:

I sometimes think about my grandmother who was sharp as a tack until she died at the age of 92.  She lived from 1901-1993.  As a child, she lived without electricity, running water and indoor toilets.  There were no movies, no phones, no cars, no planes, no radio, no TV.

She lived though a lot:  WWI,  the 1918 Flu Epidemic, the Great Depression, WWII, the development of atomic weapons and power, the Cold War, space travel and men on the moon, and, near the end of her life, the development of the personal computer and the internet.  I wish now I had engaged her more and talked much more with her about her life-long experiences.  But I was an idiot.

You're 100% correct.  

Never thought I'd say this. I need you to stop listening to Mary Hopkins and turn on Two and a Half Men

[AirwickWithCheese]

1 hour ago, Road Runner said:

 

She lived though a lot:  WWI,  the 1918 Flu Epidemic, the Great Depression, WWII, the development of atomic weapons and power, the Cold War, space travel and men on the moon, and, near the end of her life, the development of the personal computer and the internet.  I wish now I had engaged her more and talked much more with her about her life-long experiences.  But I was an idiot.

Can't get more amazing than that.  

[donkpow]

The Great Depression weighs on my mind. So does WWII. None of my relatives saw action in Korea. I saw Trump. It's a good thing I don't have children.

[ChrisL]

Yeah my life was a cake walk compared to my parents. 2 wars, POW/internee camps, losing parents to the war, starvation, near death….

They fled one country, immigrated to a second and built a nice life from nothing. 

[groupw]

My maternal grandmother died when I was 14. My paternal grandfather died when I was 16. My paternal grandmother left when Dad was little. Even though he spent summers with her parents, he had nothing good to say about her. maternal grandfather Lived until I was in my early 30s. He didn’t talk much about the past. 
My great aunt, paternal grandfather’s sister, lived to be 104. She spent a week with us when she was 92 and still sharp mentally. I asked her to tell me about their growing up. She loved growing up in idyllic little towns in IA and NE. Then the older brothers decided they were going to raise sheep in Northeast Colorado. It is a desolate and harsh area now. I can’t imagine what it was like back then! She says they nearly starved on more than one occasion. 
She became a teacher when she was 16. Had to live with a farmer family who raised chickens. They had fried chicken almost every day. People asked if she got tired of chicken. She said no. After years of poverty, it was heaven! She even asked for fried chicken when she visited us. 
So many stories that I treasure. Dad and Mom filled in some blanks over the years. The last couple years, I inherited all the papers from the various family elements. I have a feeling they may be a project for the really hot summer days. 

[Zephyr]

My paternal grandparents were born in early 1900s, through both world wars and the depression.  My grandfather was blind in one eye so the rejected him from enlisting for WWII, but he was a mill right and so worked repairing ships damaged in war.  They built the house they lived in until they died, dying in 1983 11 days apart.

My maternal grandfather was a coal miner and died of coal miners lung before Mom and Dad ever married.  My maternal Grandmother was born in 1899 and lived to be 101, so lived the entire 20th century start to finish.  She was sharp as a tack, living alone until 96 when she moved in with my Mom and Dad because that winter she no longer wanted to shovel snow.  We were close and all three of my children had a relationship with and still remember their great Grandmother.

[maddmaxx ★]

Please...........you have to keep this in mind.  Our ancestors are to blame for the conditions we are in today.  

 

_{or so I've been told.}

[Parr8hed]

Pretty amazing when you stop to think about it. 

[Kzoo]

2 hours ago, maddmaxx said:

Please...........you have to keep this in mind.  Our ancestors are to blame for the conditions we are in today.  

 

_{or so I've been told.}

 

You sound like a whiney millennial. 

 

[Kzoo]

My paternal grandfather was born in 1899 and fought in WWI.  He survived the flu, the trenches and an experience with mustard gas.  My maternal grandfather moved with his new wife from western NY to Detroit to work for Ford.  He was fortunate to have a job through the Great Depression.

My mom remembers ice for the ice box being delivered by horse cart in Detroit.  From there she saw man land on the moon and the instant communication of the internet.

My dad remembers as a child seeing the first steam farm tractor enter the county.  He helped his dad and grandfather farm with a team of horses, learning to drive horses the same time he was starting school.

Life changes...

[Road Runner]

1 hour ago, Parr8hed said:

Pretty amazing when you stop to think about it. 

Pretty simple statement, but exactly the point.  Stop and think about it.  Compare what they went through and experienced (the wars, the financial upheavals, the societal and technological changes, etc) to what most of us have "gone through".  Not much of a comparison, is it?

[bikeman564™]

Yes I do, The older I get the more I want to know family history. My Dad's parents were born here, but their parents were not. They have Hungarian & Romanian roots. My Mom's parents (both polish) were born in Poland, married in Germany after WWII (my grandfather served). They packed up a suitcase, hopped on a ship to the US, Ellis Island. From there they took the train to the Detroit station. They had a few relatives in the area. Became citizens the legal way, by way of having a sponsor and a job lined up. My grandfather went back to Poland once in the 70s for a trip, but that was it. I most likely never will travel, but it would be nice to see the town where they grew up.

[Road Runner]

26 minutes ago, bikeman564™ said:

Yes I do, The older I get the more I want to know family history.

One reason I posted this thread.  I solemnly regret not asking my parents and grandparents a whole hell of a lot more about their lives and experiences and about their ancestral heritage. 

I can only suggest that, for those of you who still have the chance to do so, don't let it pass you by. 

  

[Kirby]

Some.  Two of my grandparents died either before I was born or when I was fairly young.  But one came over as an immigrant and although she had some relatives here, she left most of her family behind when she was fairly young.  She worked as a maid for a wealthy woman, who graciously gave her the used newspaper that she could use to line her coat against the cold.  She and my grandfather worked hard to establish a good life for their kids, and they never took an opportunity for granted.   She wasn't always the easiest woman, but I do respect all she went through and how hard she worked.  When she was much older, and living alone in a house. she fell and broke a bone in her hip.  Before she called anyone to come help, she scrubbed the kitchen floor, even with the pain.  She said that if she didn't survive the hospital, she didn't want people coming to her house and thinking she was a bad housekeeper.

[MoseySusan]

My dad has shared a lot of stories about his life and his parents. Not so much on my mom’s side, though. She died of cancer at age 49; my grandparents are all deceased.
 

We moseyed through the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology last Friday. They have wax figures of human ancestors from 27,000 years ago. Someone in “my family” lived that long ago. I have some Neanderthal dna, according to 23 and Me, and my maternal line originated in the Ural Mountain region. 

[maddmaxx ★]

3 hours ago, Kzoo said:

 

You sound like a whiney millennial. 

 

That was exactly how I intended for that to sound.

[Rattlecan ★]

3 hours ago, Road Runner said:

Pretty simple statement, but exactly the point.  Stop and think about it.  Compare what they went through and experienced (the wars, the financial upheavals, the societal and technological changes, etc) to what most of us have "gone through".  Not much of a comparison, is it?

Yeah. When my son was a teenager he used to whine about how hard his life was. I would tell him he had no idea what hardship is and furthermore neither do I.

[jsharr ★]

My paternal grandfather was born in Indian Territory.  His parents ran a boarding house that catered to cowboys driving cattle on the Chisholm Trail.  He was a steam locomotive repairman until he got crushed in a train car coupler.
Like others.  He watched us go from horseback to steam, to gas, to jets, to rockets to the moon and beyond.  Watched the birth of so many things.  I to do not think another generation will ever see such visible change.

[MoseySusan]

Also to the point, daily living according to my dad. A few of these were part of my childhood, too. Not because I’m old, but because my dad was reluctant to spend money. He preferred to save for hard times coming. 
I saw each of the stoves where my grandparents early on cooked everything with wood/coal heat, washing clothes with a scrubbing board or wringer washer and hanging items on a line to dry, mostly hand-sewn one or two outfits and sometimes shoes, always hand-me-down coats, dirt roads, high birth/infant mortality, whiskey and other home remedies, walking a lot, no way of contacting people if circumstances change, a push mower, a coffee percolator pot…. I could go on. 

[12string]

I read this book:   

 

We suck

And I don't think we realize what advances we've lived through

[MickinMD ★]

It's funny, but when I was growing up in the 50's and 60's, I used to think that my grandparents lived such a primitive life as adults in the 1890's and on, but that they'd seen a lot of history and technological advancement.  I would think of the 1920's and before as being really long ago.

Now, with nephews born in 2000 and 2008, the 1970's are as ancient to them as the 1920's were to me.  WW1 occurred as long before they were born than the Civil War was to me.

My relatives and I often talk about our grandparents and what they saw come into existence: the automobile, radio, TV, automatic washing machines, electric refrigerators, WW1, the Great Depression, WW2, etc.  Now that I've learned a lot more about them and their ancestors through ancestry.com, I wish I could ask them questions.

Similarly, as I went from the 1980's to the 2000's as a teacher, kids began to look puzzled when I mentioned things they had never seen like record players, floppy disks, quarter mile cinder tracks and others that were not rubberized asphalt. Taking the tubes out of your TV and going to the machine in the hardware store to test the tubes was caveman stuff to them!  One classroom had some really old desks with a hole at the edge for an inkwell.  When I told the teenagers what the hole was for and that my father had gotten in trouble in school in the 1930's for dipping a girl's ponytail in his inkwell, they stared blankly - still not understanding how it would have functioned.

They couldn't imagine a time where the students used slide rules, calculators didn't exist, washing machines had rollers to manually squeeze most of the water out of the clothes, there were no artificial satellites, no one had ever been in outer space, TV was black and white, the was no Internet, no wrinkle-free clothing, no microwave. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Of course, milk had it's normal amount of cream and if the milkman delivered it on a freezing morning, the cream rose to the top, froze, and pushed the foil cap off, curving like a banana and providing some cheap ice cream.

 

[shootingstar]

45 minutes ago, MickinMD said:

....... like record players, floppy disks, quarter mile cinder tracks and others that were not rubberized asphalt. Taking the tubes out of your TV and going to the machine in the hardware store to test the tubes was caveman stuff to them!  One classroom had some really old desks with a hole at the edge for an inkwell.  When I told the teenagers what the hole was for and that my father had gotten in trouble in school in the 1930's for dipping a girl's ponytail in his inkwell, they stared blankly - still not understanding how it would have functioned.

They couldn't imagine a time where the students used slide rules, calculators didn't exist, washing machines had rollers to manually squeeze most of the water out of the clothes, there were no artificial satellites, no one had ever been in outer space, TV was black and white, the was no Internet, no wrinkle-free clothing, no microwave. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Of course, milk had it's normal amount of cream and if the milkman delivered it on a freezing morning, the cream rose to the top, froze, and pushed the foil cap off, curving like a banana and providing some cheap ice cream.

 

Sometimes the next generation, it does depend what they are exposed from older family members.  The dip ink thing....very few, but there will the rare who might appreciate handmade calligraphy from an artistic standpoint. It is still a skill and an art.

As for slide rulers, calculators etc., I'm certain my eldest niece and nephew have seen their professor father in his engineering faculty, teach calculus, etc., where some short instance he is pointing out /writing out parts of the mathematical formulae in the lecture room pre-covid.  My brother-in-law has been  teaching undergrad. courses for over the last 30 years, so his children would have seen their father in action for a short drop-in.   Niece  would have the very popular movie a few years  ago "Hidden Figures", featuring the  black female mathematicians and engineer working for NASA, and would  seen and have appreciated all that math (she did major engineering at university).... In hindsight, that movie was excellent to show teens and general public what advanced math actually means from the standpoint of human skill in thinking and problem-solving.

[shootingstar]

In my career, information management and searching moved from card catalogue (for me only lst 2 yrs. of working), through several generations of information management and searching. Due to Google, now alot of people expect their corporate wide business information systems to do a dummy google search and provides results like Google. It sure can and you might end up with a barrage of less useful stuff.

Unless a corporation buys/subscribes to Google agent, the answer is  no. Sure there is automation in various software to configure (months spent to configure/design) for federated searching, but with still several different proprietary vendor information systems with different architectural walls, a corporation often can't afford  $$$$$$ to customize and sustain that degree of search power. People don't understand what is actually required for machine learning on semantics for automated semantic matching...  aka searching

If users are not sensitive to language, words and different meanings in word usage for same word, and how to program software to distinguish those differences, it can be time-consuming, costly and STILL not give business reliant accuracy all the time. That's ok, if the garbage  /misinformation is not going to result in unnecessary costs, loss of life or someone hurt, goods damaged.

So we still are back to metadata tagging ..but more selectively and maybe less. But still requiring humans to understand how to apply right word value to document.   That means imposing some rules which humans often don't like.

 

[Square Wheels]

I have no idea what it was like for my ancestors.  Not sure how much I trust my parents and their recollection of the past, or their ability to tell me the truth.

[ChrisL]

17 hours ago, MickinMD said:

It's funny, but when I was growing up in the 50's and 60's, I used to think that my grandparents lived such a primitive life as adults in the 1890's and on, but that they'd seen a lot of history and technological advancement.  I would think of the 1920's and before as being really long ago.

Now, with nephews born in 2000 and 2008, the 1970's are as ancient to them as the 1920's were to me.  WW1 occurred as long before they were born than the Civil War was to me.

My relatives and I often talk about our grandparents and what they saw come into existence: the automobile, radio, TV, automatic washing machines, electric refrigerators, WW1, the Great Depression, WW2, etc.  Now that I've learned a lot more about them and their ancestors through ancestry.com, I wish I could ask them questions.

Similarly, as I went from the 1980's to the 2000's as a teacher, kids began to look puzzled when I mentioned things they had never seen like record players, floppy disks, quarter mile cinder tracks and others that were not rubberized asphalt. Taking the tubes out of your TV and going to the machine in the hardware store to test the tubes was caveman stuff to them!  One classroom had some really old desks with a hole at the edge for an inkwell.  When I told the teenagers what the hole was for and that my father had gotten in trouble in school in the 1930's for dipping a girl's ponytail in his inkwell, they stared blankly - still not understanding how it would have functioned.

They couldn't imagine a time where the students used slide rules, calculators didn't exist, washing machines had rollers to manually squeeze most of the water out of the clothes, there were no artificial satellites, no one had ever been in outer space, TV was black and white, the was no Internet, no wrinkle-free clothing, no microwave. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Of course, milk had it's normal amount of cream and if the milkman delivered it on a freezing morning, the cream rose to the top, froze, and pushed the foil cap off, curving like a banana and providing some cheap ice cream.

 

 

16 hours ago, shootingstar said:

Sometimes the next generation, it does depend what they are exposed from older family members.  The dip ink thing....very few, but there will the rare who might appreciate handmade calligraphy from an artistic standpoint. It is still a skill and an art.

As for slide rulers, calculators etc., I'm certain my eldest niece and nephew have seen their professor father in his engineering faculty, teach calculus, etc., where some short instance he is pointing out /writing out parts of the mathematical formulae in the lecture room pre-covid.  My brother-in-law has been  teaching undergrad. courses for over the last 30 years, so his children would have seen their father in action for a short drop-in.   Niece  would have the very popular movie a few years  ago "Hidden Figures", featuring the  black female mathematicians and engineer working for NASA, and would  seen and have appreciated all that math (she did major engineering at university).... In hindsight, that movie was excellent to show teens and general public what advanced math actually means from the standpoint of human skill in thinking and problem-solving.

I recalled earlier that I wasn’t sure of my dads education but he was trained as an electrician in the military in the late 1940’s & early 50’s.   I still remember him using a slide rule when helping me with my math homework. 

[Road Runner]

Just now, ChrisL said:

I recalled earlier that I wasn’t sure of my dads education but he was trained as an electrician in the military in the late 1940’s & early 50’s.   I still remember him using a slide rule when helping me with my math homework. 

I used a slide rule, too.  Until the early 70's, when I got my first calculator.  But I continued to use the slide rule a while longer, because early calculators didn't do scientific functions.

[Parsnip Totin Jack ★]

We no longer have to worry about packs of velociraptors hunting us for lunch. Or that bearded guy riding a T-Rex. 

[Ralphie ★]

This was a quintessential rr thread.

I found it by searching the forum for barrage, inspired by me using that word today at work.