The long reach of time
[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post that first appeared in March of 2013, repeated now for no particular reason except that I like it.]
My mother’s very first memory was of being frightened by booming noises—guns? cannon? fireworks?—while being held aloft above a crowd to view a New York harbor filled with ships. She wept and her parents comforted her. The year was 1918, and she was four years old, and they told her there was no reason to cry because it was a happy occasion: the end of the Great War.
They didn’t yet realize that someday it would be known as the First.
That was a long time ago. But it really wasn’t all that long ago, since my very own mother remembered it. She grew up in an extended family shaped like an inverted pyramid, the only child of an only child. Her father had become chronically ill around the time she was born, and so her parents had to move in with her mother’s parents. They never moved out again until both grandparents had died and the house was sold, around the time of my birth.
So that’s how it happened that my mother was raised by four people, two of whom had been born during the early 1850s. All four of them had held and reassured my mother when those booming noises had announced the end of the Great War in that scene that constituted her first memory. So, although my mother became a modern woman who smoked cigarettes, drove a car, went to college, and voted as soon as she turned twenty-one (in that order, I believe), two of the people closest to her in her youth remembered the Civil War vividly.
This story illustrates how easy it is to reach back in time, at least in a “six degrees of separation” sort of way. All it takes is a family with a series of long-lived people who have children relatively late in life.
For example, with the proper connections, my mother could easily have known someone who knew someone who lived in the 1700s—and in the early 1700s, at that. That’s how we get the phenomenon of those Civil War widows who died as late as the early years of the twenty-first century. The recipe for that requires a very elderly woman who had gotten married very young to a veteran husband who was very old.
I’ve already described my mother’s family. But my father’s family also had an exceptionally long reach back in time. My paternal grandfather was born around 1860 and died in the 1920s. But he was the youngest of twelve children, the eldest of whom was a sister of his born in the year 1838.
Please let that sink in for a moment: my own grandfather’s sister was born in 1838. Not only that, but she lived to be over 100 years old and dance at my parents’ wedding. She appears in photos of the occasion, a small figure wearing a black headscarf, almost impossibly old and wrinkled but smiling.
I never met her; she died some years before I was born. But what tales she might have told! One of the difficulties of reaching back in time by talking to the elderly is that the young rarely have the inclination to do it before it’s too late. Old people—who cares what they have to say?
The answer might be: people who collect oral histories, that’s who. And while it’s true that there’s a growing industry of recording the memories of the elderly while they are still around to tell them, I wonder how many people will be listening in the future. It’s in the nature of the young these days to dismiss what used to known as the wisdom of the ages, or the thought that the experience of the past has any relevance to the present or the future. It’s one of the reasons why we fail to learn all that much from history.
Great post Neo. I didn’t see it the first time. Your last paragraph touches on a great point. Younger adults that don’t have an historical connection to the previous generations, by and large do not have an accurate assessment of things like, hardship, sacrifice, and personal responsibility as so many of them have only known life with the government hand-out to take care of x,y & z. Ironic that we have an aged socialist as a popular choice in that group.
When my dad, who’s 88, talks about the past and our family’s history, I get a notepad out and jot down aides memoires. Then type it up and email it to The Family.
Margaret Mitchell (b. 1900), for another example, knew quite a few Confederate veterans in her girlhood, and Atlantans who’d lived through The War and The Siege of Atlanta, as well as “Redestruction.” She had a lot of vivid source material for Gone with the Wind, and spent a decade doing library research, making damn sure she got the facts straight.
My own grandmother was born in 1900, the other in 1907. I asked the latter about the Great War and what it was like during all that, and she just said, “Well, it was pretty bad.” I sat expectant, but that’s all I got! (lady of few words, alas).
Our kids, the Twenty-somethings, are getting very interested in the family history. One niece is looking into the DAR (my grandmother was a member), and my cousin was able to send her Blanche’s DAR membership number. A nephew has become fascinated by the War Between the States.
So there’s hope. 🙂 It’s up to us grownups to instigate the “Let us all sit around the campfire and tell tales of the old days” occasions. Our five younguns really are fascinated by all that. I think they crave the wisdom of the elders instinctively — what have you lived through? what was it like? how did you survive? (Not starched-drawers PC lectures, but the real blood and bone of experience!)
E.g.: when the Great Blackout of 2003 struck, I was in an office in midtown. Almost all youngsters. Only one grayhead on the floor — a dumpy, unprepossessing spinster named Jean. But as soon as the lights went out, everyone moved to her, by instinct, and started to pump her for information: “Were you in the blackout in the 1970s?… Were you in the blackout in the 1960s? what was it like? how did you get home? were there riots??”
She glowed in the unexpected attention: All that life experience, suddenly in demand!
I think the key to getting them interested is to have two or more of the Elders reminiscing about a great dramatic event in the past. That hooks ours every time.
Interesting. I have been reading Jean Edward Smiths biography of US Grant and was struck by the similarities between Andrew Johnsons stump style, as described, and Trumps
My grandfather was born around 1890 and lived to 93. In his life he went from the horse and buggy to men on the moon.
“World’s first anti-ageing drug could see humans live to 120”
Should this come to pass, what happens to societal stability when there are far too few jobs for the young?
Once again, that pesky Law of Unintended Consequence.
“My mother’s very first memory was of being” held on the shoulders of her father watching the troops come home from WW1 in 1918.
Albert Henry Woolson (February 11, 1850 — August 2, 1956) was the last surviving member of the Union Army who served in the American Civil War. He was also the last surviving Civil War veteran on either side whose status is undisputed.
It would seem that even I was born into a world (1945) that still have civil war vets moving around.
Nice post.
Like so many, much of my family history has been lost. Part of that is my fault, because I went off to the Navy and ties to many extended family members were were loose, or lost. Older cousins argued over such treasures as grandmother’s family Bible, with so much history annotated. Now those cousins are gone, and I don’t know if their own children cherish the treasures they have.
I have written everything I remember, and that which I have researched for my children and grandchildren. It is fascinating to see the surprise as they read of how the family experienced events as late as World War II. I think it important that each generation have some understanding of the previous, and now, perspective on the pace of change. My grandparents were born just a few years after the end of the Civil War; I have a copy of a letter written by a Confederate ancestor from a Union prison camp. I don’t who he was, nor how he was related. But, I had access to people who were close to others who actually experienced one of the cataclysmic events in our history. Lost stories.
Wonderful recollections neo, and others. I know much about my ancestors. My paternal ancestors were Scot-Irish who came to the New World in the 1740s. After the Revolutionary war they trekked the Cumberland Gap and settled in the hills and hollows of SE Kentucky. On the maternal side they were French Canadians following the fur trade down the Mississippi, and eventually settled in Southern Illinois and NW Kentucky. My maternal great grandfather mrried a Shawnee woman
Neo:
It’s intriguing that you tell a tale of what scared your mother.
I’ve been told that I have a stern look, and I think it’s because my pregnant mom was terrified by the back end of the Staten Island ferry.
;~)
My great grandfather was the last surviving Union veteran in Ohio (a drummer boy). Fortunately he was interviewed by his hometown newspaper two years before he died. I still have an original clipping.
As my father got older I began to pump him for his experiences. I recorded what I got and wrote it up for the family.
“I have a copy of a letter written by a Confederate ancestor from a Union prison camp. ”
Which camp?
The internet also collects them, since you can record your stories in digital format, and pass them down to your children or grandchildren as an inheritance.
“these days”?
John Tyler (1790-1862), tenth president of the United States, has two living grandsons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tyler#Family_and_personal_life
We lived with my paternal grandparents, although my grandmother had had a stroke and I don’t remember talking with her. But I do remember sitting with my grandfather and asking him to tell me about when he was a little boy. Unfortunately, I never made notes (he died when I was 12). Aside from his memory of one Christmas when he played outside in his shirtsleeves and on New Years Day there was a blizzard. That certainly has affected the way I hear the climate/weather alarmists today. I guess most of our other talks just got assimilated into my worldview. I spent loads of time with him in his workshop in our basement. He was an excellnt cabinetmaker, and I learned about ogee feet, various moldings styles, and different types of lumber before he died.
His father was awarded a medal of honor in the civil war, but most of what I know about him and the rest of the family history came from historical accounts. I grew up within 20 miles of where the family settled before the revolution.
My father, grandfather, and great grandfather were all the youngest in their families.
parker,
Interesting parallels between your family history and the late western author Louis L’Amour and his famous Sackett family.
If memory serves, L’Amour was of French Canadian descent, the Sacketts were Scot/Irish with the Cumberland Gap and Kentucky-Tennessee area prominantly mentioned.
expat,
I once read that before the advent of modern transportation, most people lived their entire lives within 25 miles of where they were born. Obviously there were migrations and travelers but the historian maintained that those were, at any point, a small percentage of the world’s population.
geokstr:
Back end or front end—it’s a ferry, right?
I will be 75 in March. One of my early memories; it must have occurred just after World War II, was going to a farm house in the Ligonier Valley (Western Pa.) where an old farmer, who had been a friend of our family, had died. He was laid out on the second floor in a bed surrounded by flowers. I walked up the stairs in a solemn line of mourners, my mother and my uncle in front of me. It was only the second time I had seen a dead body laid out and the only time I ever saw one laid out in the very bed where he had probably died. But what interested me most that day was on a plain oak dresser on one side of the room. It was a Colt Dragoon pistol. Immense. Pewter colored. I could not resist running my fingers along the barrel. My Uncle George explained that the father of the man laid out on the bed had carried that pistol during the Civil War. I have often thought of that day and realized that many of those who attended that viewing in that farmhouse would have had childhood memories deep into the 19th century as I have them deep into the 20th. I often think back to the funerals of family and friends which I attended when I was a boy; I now wish I had listened more intently to the conversation of my elders — to the stories they were telling of the “old days.” But like most teenagers, I was just anxious to go off with whatever contemporaries I might find there, my cousins or friends. We’d gather on the porch of the house or the sidewalk outside the funeral home. I regret missing a lot of interesting family history.
“One of the difficulties of reaching back in time by talking to the elderly is that the young rarely have the inclination to do it before it’s too late.” [Neo]
It’s true. I was the same way myself when I was young. The Pennsylvania Dutch have a saying: “We grow too soon old and too late schmart.”
“I once read that before the advent of modern transportation, most people lived their entire lives within 25 miles of where they were born. [GB]
Think about that. Before the advent of the automobile a 25 mile journey was a day’s journey (or perhaps even a day and a half). As a former medievalist, I oftentimes thought about people hundreds/thousands of years ago living 20 or so miles from the coast, living and dying never having seen the sea, not able to even imagine a vast and endless expanse of water. Imagine what a tremendously exciting place a city like Venice must have seemed for those few able to get there; strange people; strange goods; even strange animals from the faraway places of the earth.
Now transpose this to Robert Ballard’s musings about the great flood (the ocean spilling over the Bosporous to create the Black Sea and someone who, never having seen the sea, says his/her “whole world” was flooded. Thus, perhaps, is the source of the flood epic present in most major religions.
My grandmother on my mother’s side told me about the time in 1893 (she was eight years old) when her father raced for land in the Cherokee Strip in Oklahoma. They successfully staked a plot of land near what is now Perry, Oklahoma. That became the family farm where she lived until she married my grandfather in 1903.
My grandfather was one of eight children, of which six survived child birth. His father, my great grandfather, was a “rolling stone.” He was a carpenter with a full kit of tools. They traveled by wagon through Missouri, Kansas, South Dakota, and finally to Oklahoma. Since my great grandfather was a good carpenter he could almost always find work. But he tired of a village or town fairly quickly and kept moving on.
They were living in Pierre, South Dakota when the Army brought in a band of hostile Sioux Indians. (One of the last or maybe the last.) My grandfather was curious and snuck out to the encampment. The soldiers shooed him away, but not before he had seen enough to know that the Indians were all in pretty bad shape. The Sioux had been on the run for many weeks without adequate food or rest. Their clothes were tattered and filthy, long hair matted and unkempt, and they had a hang-dog, defeated look. I’ve always remembered that tale when watching Westerns. Things on the frontier were tough – tougher than Hollywood depicted.
My grandfather hated farming so he left the farm in Oklahoma when he was old enough to get work. He learned to be a jack of all trades and met grandmother in Perry. After marrying, they decided to move to Denver, Colorado because they heard it was building up and there were many jobs available. My grandfather managed to learn to be an electrician and eventually worked on constructing the Daniels and Fishers Tower, at that time the tallest building in Denver. After the D&F Towers job he answered an ad to go to Estes Park, Colorado and wire the Stanley Hotel, which was being built by F.O Stanley, the inventor of the Stanley Steamer and a member of Boston society. Mr. Stanley built a dam and hydro-electric power plant on Fall River, running the power lines first to his hotel and later he established the Estes Park Electric Company to supply electricity to other hotels and dude ranches. After wiring the hotel my grandfather stayed in Estes Park to run the Estes Park Electric Company for Mr. Stanley. After about fifteen years he was able to start the first hardware store in Estes Park and be his own boss.
During WWII, I used to help my grandfather, who was in his late sixties, do wiring jobs. He had sold the hardware store and wanted to retire, but with the war on there weren’t many young tradesmen around to do the necessary jobs at the hotel, dude ranches, and summer homes. During those jobs he told me many stories of his youth. I wish now I had written them down, but like young people today, I thought they were interesting but had no capacity to see how they related to my life and aspirations.
I have written a rough (scraps of information and recall) family history that I passed on to my larger family. A couple of them have actually found it interesting, but for most it is just a quaint tale that has little to do with them. Sigh.
In a world history class in college, the professor gave us an assignment to interview our parents, “we’re all part of history.”
So I sat with my mom in the kitchen, scribbling notes as fast as I could, as she talked into the small hours of the morning.
She described Poland of the 1930’s, Treblinka, the soviet gulags, death and tragedy and the exodus and renewal of the surviving remnant. She never told us as children.
After I gave my class presentation, she took the report and hid it. “I lost it,’ she said. I found it in her files after she passed a few years ago.
It was a great homework assignment.
My granddaughter knows why three towns in Holland have renamed streets “Timberwolfstraat”. It’s because the people are thankful to Great Grampa’s team (104th ID–Timberwolves) who came to fight the bad guys a long time ago.
It will be a while, I hope, before she finds out just how bad the bad guys were.
I was blessed with a story telling grandmother. She was born in 1900 but was very familiar with her family history and the history of my grandfather’s family. Consequently, I know many mid-19th century Civil War stories as well as many other stories that reveal the nature of America in general. I have the folding camp chair my great-great-great grandfather took with him to the Civil War. I now find that my siblings and my cousins tuned her out while I lapped it all up. They now come to me constantly asking about these things. I am sure I am slim on some details (I was a child) but at least we have some of it! I need to write it all down.
Rutgers, the institution I work for, has a wonderful collection of oral histories. http://oralhistory.rutgers.edu/
It’s a joke, Neo, many of which call for, like movies, a suspension of disbelief. I heard that one as a kid when I lived in Ridgewood, Nyew Yawk. And what creates more imagery of a “boat” in NY than the Staten Island ferry?
Old (86) guy here.
When I was about 8-10 years old I watched a parade (Memorial Day? 4th of July?) near my family’s home in Queens NYC.
At one point people near me said “Here’s the GAR!”
They were in the back seat of a convertible. Two old men in Union blue Civil War uniforms waving at the small crowd.
GAR = Grand Army of the Republic. The organization of Union vets. (The American Legion wasn’t formed until WWI.)
When I was in my 20’s, I sat and talked with my grandmother (born 1909, died 2004) about life in general. Like others, her life spanned from the horse and buggy to the moon landings. I once asked her what technological innovation had the greatest effect on her life. I was thinking it would be aviation or the automobile.
No. Without hesitation, she said “the flush toilet”.
It’s easy for us to forget that little things that we take for granted had a dramatic effect on ordinary folks. The flush toilet had been invented back in the 1700’s. Yet it didn’t reach the homes of most ordinary Americans until the early to mid 20th century. (…sometimes even later than that. Outhouses on farms were common right into the 1970’s) Before the flush toilet, cholera and other water-born diseases were a lot more common.
She also talked about how much the roads had improved. Though she was not well traveled, she mentioned that when she was a little girl a trip to town, about 17 miles away, was an all day affair. And a trip to Louisville, the nearest city and about 50 miles away, was a multi-day extravaganza requiring train travel. They did that, maybe twice a year.
When I was little, I remember staying over at her house. She heated the place with coal stoves that had to be replenished from the coal bin on the back porch. I’ll never forget carrying that coal scuttle back and forth. In mid summer, us kids would go out and pick blackberries. She made *the best* blackberry jam out of our pickings.
I still miss her.
I can picture that.
Back in the late eighties, early in my career, I moved for a time to North Carolina.
I recall driving along certain blacktop roads on early summer mornings, and seeing smoke rise from distant houses down side valleys, maybe a quarter mile off. (Think of Bat Cave Road or something more remote as a cut across route, for the general idea)
It never occurred to me until much later why anyone would have a furnace going it the summer. It wasn’t a furnace. It was the kitchen, no doubt.
My own grandmother had a Warm Morning coal/wood stove for supplemental heat on her “Back porch” – a kind of three season addition stretching across the back of the house.
Eventually took that stove up to the cabin where it was used for a number of years. Had the loading door sill not cracked and gone missing, and the door settled too low at closing, the thing would have lasted forever. As it was there was no way, even with added door gasketing, to stop it from smoking.
Something about a wood fire and hot coffee in a chilly but gradually warming room.
“That’s how we get the phenomenon of those Civil War widows who died as late as the early years of the twenty-first century.”
FYI Looks like the Govt. may still be paying a civil war pension 🙂 At least it was in 2014.
http://time.com/95195/civil-war-pensioner/
“The last living child of a Civil War veteran, Irene Triplett still receives a monthly pension from the federal government
Irene Triplett, 84, receives a $73.13 monthly pension payment from the Department of Veteran Affairs every month. It’s for her father’s military service–in the American Civil War.
Triplett is the last child of any Civil War veteran to still receive benefits for the conflict that ended a century-and-a-half ago, the Wall Street Journal reports. Triplett’s father, Mose Triplett, was born in 1846 and joined the Confederate forces in 1862 before deserting and signing up with the Union. In the 1920s, he married a women 50 years his junior, who later gave birth to Irene.”
Mikell:
That’s amazing.
I sometimes wonder what a lack of historical curiosity says about someone’s mindset, and what if anything that might be correlated with in terms of more global aspects of personality.
If older things do not strike you as somewhat remarkable in terms of their somewhat mysterious perdurance, their uncanny reach “back” from the flowing present to the inaccessible past, and their value in explaining to some degree how and why what is now, takes the shape it does, then I cannot imagine what the mind not interested in that, is instead furnished with or provoked by.
Of course things like that may only demonstrate that motion and change without a “real time” is the only reality; but certainly they are provocative on those grounds as well.
What kind of people are not fascinated by time, and the presence of what is present and its recession into “the past”?
When I researched my family history, I was surprised how little my mother knew about her grandparents. I have come to the conclusion that at about the 3rd generation back, people just fade away. I have started writing a series of snapshots of my life (not a book) to leave my children to pass onto their grandchildren!
On my father’s side, my grandparents were immigrants who never talked about the old country. My mother came from a broken home. I have, essentially, no ancestry. I guess that could make some people less interested in history, but it’s probably made me moreso. Context is an amazing thing. It reminds me of a story that John Madden told, that when he became a football coach, he went out and watched every football game he could find, from little leagues to the pros, so that no matter what situation his team found themselves in, he could say that he’d seen it before.
Fascinating stories. Loved the “flush toilet” answer. It would boggle a few minds, but at least through 1947, many parts of the rural south had no electricity, no running water, and, of course, no flush toilets. I spent summers on an Uncle’s farm in Suwanee County, Fl and had the pleasure of the experience; among many others that would seem other world today. Hard life, and women probably had it hardest. Cooked on a wood stove (at noon of a Florida summer day), laundry in a huge iron pot over an open fire, wring the chicken’s neck for Sunday dinner. And so forth. (Of course walking behind a mule in the Florida heat was no “walk in the park” either.)
It wasn’t just the remote areas. Actually, we lived the war years, and the first few after, at my grandparent’s home just on the edge of urban Tampa, Fl. It was electrified, and their home was rather luxurious, because Grandfather had installed an indoor bath and an electric pump for his well–few neighbors had those. They heated water–sort of– with a home made solar system.
All of this just 70 years ago.
If you don’t know history, you can claim with perfect innocence that something silly will work.
If you do know history, you can claim it will work this time because we’re doing it better.
Me again. As Oldflyer says, “All this just 70 years ago.” I lived the first decade of my life in a house in which the only heat was supplied by two coal stoves, back-to-back, one in the living room the other in the dining room, and a small kerosene stove in the kitchen. Upstairs you were on your own in winter. You would wake under the immense weight of “comforters” to find the windows all blurry with ice on the inside. I would scrape a tiny hole on the glass with my fingernails to see if more snow had fallen. Grandma always had the stoves going by the time my brothers and I rolled out of bed and ran down the stairs clutching our clothes to dress near one of the them, its iron belly glowing red and the coal inside purring. When we moved to a house with something called a “basement” and a “coal furnace,” we felt we had indeed reached the modern age.
Great post. It reminded me of Last of the Doughboys by Richard Rubin, which is about the last remaining WWI veterans. The author reflected on the life span of these centenarians by considering the same length of time backwards from their dates of birth. For some of them that “lifespan” brought them back to the founding fathers. It’s fascinating to contemplate. I highly recommend the book, by the way.
Shaking the dust of the old country from your shoes, is as you point out one reason.
And some people, no fault of their own, have miserable and humiliating pasts.
Pop sociologists have claimed to notice a bifurcation taking place in “white” America … with one college educated highly driven segment valuing familial cohesion, marriage, and education, and another segment sliding toward a drugged existence as a bastard producing lumpen-proletariat.
We will recall that this may not be an unnatural state of affairs, and that only a certain amount of social coercion, feelings of shame over inadequacy, and a “root hog or die” dilemma resulting from a political libertarianism, kept it from happening in the United States earlier.
wonderful post & terrific responses!
J.J. Says:
February 5th, 2016 at 12:10 am
— I have vacationed in Estes Park often, but never stayed at the Stanley (too rich for my pocket!). Great stories.
For those interested in family history, the LDS Church (Mormons) have an immense investment in the process and huge archives, material and digital. Use of their facilities is free; just contact your local congregation (ward) anywhere in the world.
I’ve always been interested in history, so much so that I majored in it in college. I too have a connection to the Civil War– my maternal grandmother (born in 1888) used to talk about her two grandfathers, both of whom had served in a German-speaking Pennsylvania regiment in the Army of the Potomac. Also World War II: my father didn’t like to talk much about what he saw as a paratrooper (82nd Airborne), but what he did share made me recognize the high cost of freedom and resolve never to take it for granted.
I’d like to add, though, that I’m personally cognizant of the benefits of change as well as continuity, particularly the Nineteenth Amendment. I remember the first time that I realized that my grandmother– a schoolteacher– was in her thirties before she could vote for her president, and that my own mother (born in 1915) was born into a world in which she could not assume that she could vote when she came of age. I am reminded of this aspect of family history every time I read some self-important male huff and puff in the comments section of various blogs that what this country needs is to repeal the Nineteenth Amendment. I still remember my sixth-grade teacher impressing on everyone in our American history class (history, not “civics”!) the importance of voting in elections, and being mindful that it is a great responsibility as well as a privilege. I have not and do not take that privilege for granted; and anyone who still wants to caricature women as emotion-ridden intellectual lightweights unworthy of the right to vote will have to pry the franchise from my very much still-living hands.
Okay, end of sermon!