The passage of time: fathers and daughters and granddaughters
My great-grandfather holding my grandmother:
My great-grandfather holding my mother:
He died just a couple of years before I was born.
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
I was out walking in our touristy area a few days ago, where I go to sit and watch the ocean. There was this group of 3 women and a carriage enjoying the sights and consulting their smartphone for their next stop.
I noticed them all speaking French, and then it dawned on me that this was 4 generations of one family. Great grandma was quite spry and was shouldering a hefty backpack. Grandma took the toddler down to the beach. Very nice!
I have a little bit unusual family history on my mother’s side. Her father was born in 1849. She was born in 1898, when he was 48. He died in 1899 when she was 18 months old. I was born when she was 40 so, my grandfather was alive during the Civil War, age 11 when it began. It’s possible he could have been a soldier before it ended at his age of 16. She died in 2001 so she lived in three centuries. She was alert with her mental status excellent until 6 months before she died, when she began to fade. My older children used to travel to Chicago to spend time with her and she would talk about writing letters to soldiers in WWI and remembering the Titanic. I took her to see the movie when it came out.
Neo, I’m so glad that you have the photos. Thank you for sharing them with us.
It seems to me that I see a bit of you in your mother-to-be. Maybe it’s my memory of the photo of you that you used to use here. :>)
I wish I hadn’t lost the photos I had of my grandparents. I have three albums of photos that were probably my great-grandmother’s, but there’s no indication anywhere in them as to who appears in the pictures. I believe they’re all from the 1800s.
Mike — As always, I enjoy your reminiscences. Thanks for this one as well.
Nice to compare the photos:
Older photo Great Grandfather looks a bit on edge, protective….maybe a hint of desperation in his expression .
Newer photo he looks satisfied, proud, open.
Very cool
Mike K,
One of my biggest regrets is not talking with my grandfather who was born in 1892 and died in 1990 about his youth and WWI and the amazing changes he had seen. We were pretty close but he was not the open type of person and I was young and didn’t appreciate the incredible wealth of knowledge he possessed.
They were so young. Your grandmother was just a baby, your mother was barely out of diapers, and you were just a gleam in her eyes. And the proud papa, whose hair turned white over two generations. Cute and sweet.
Michael K,
Wow, 1849! My grandfather on my mother’s side was born in 1926, and I am only about 30 or so years younger than you. The only relative I have ever known personally who was born in the 19th century was my mom’s grandmother who died when I was teenager, and she was born in the same year as your mother.
Mike K:
My grandfathers don’t go back as far as that, but one of them was born in the late 1860s or 1870 at the latest. The other was just a tiny bit younger. And one of my grandfathers had a sibling (my great aunt) born in 1849. There was a tradition of late births in my family, similar to yours but not quite as extreme.
And also similar to Mike K my grandfather was 38 when my father was born and my dad was almost 39 when I was born. Contrast that with my 87 year old mother having a 2 year old great great grandson.
The longest-lived of my great-grandfathers (or great-grandmothers, for that matter) was born in 1851 and died in 1945- spanning the Civil War through World War II. Having lived through the Civil War in the South, Yankees were not his favorite people. During World War II, one of his granddaughters met and got engaged to a Navy flyboy from Massachusetts stationed at a nearby base. Her grandfather told her, “I hear you’re marrying a Yankee.” She replied, “And a Damned Yankee at that.” Which is what my mother also did, though after her grandfather had died.
My grandmother, like her father,lived into her 90s, and beat her father by a year. I got to know her pretty well when I was an adult. She could tell the stories!
I am familiar with the photo of Neo’s great-grandfather with Neo’s mother, but don’t recall seeing the photo of her great-grandfather with Neo’s grandmother. I see a family resemblance.
A cousin is in the countdown for her husband’s death at age 79 from inoperable cancer. We took advantage of the situation to swap family stories.
I have a picture of my great grandfather and when I look at it I think we would have really like each other. I think I look like him.
Thanks for fine photos, brings up memories.
My grandfather was born in 1900, died in 1987 (same year as my dad, born 1930).
Even tho I lived with him for a few teen years, he didn’t talk about his early life. And I didn’t ask.
He and my grandmother would drive from S. Cal to Chicago to Florida and back, every year, to visit friends / family — many family from Chicago moved to Florida, some to S. Cal, some stayed.
When grandmother died in 1972, he was quite lonely for a couple of years, then married my step-grandmother in ’75, a long time friend. Those two continued the triangle of trips to Chicago, Florida, L.A., until granpa got too old to drive safely in 1986. We had a big birthday party for him then, even with some pictures of my dad & mother together with their 4 kids, tho they’d been divorced for decades.
I have no pictures of the grandparents as young folk. Now I’m sad about it. Neo, you’ve showed them before, but I’m not tired of seeing them, and your thoughts about them.
“Long ago it must be, I have a photograph. Preserve your memories. They’re all that’s left you.”
A bigger topic is that we are heading for a day when we have few physical pictures anymore. Everything is digital. If something really, really bad happens all those digital photos will be gone.
Same goes for the written word in diary form. Where would be with out the meticulous writings of Queen Victoria, John and Abigail Adams, John Quincy Adams, Theodore Roosevelt and many, many others. These are not good developments.
Interesting.
One of the things that surprises many of us is how “not-intolerable” life may have been for people of past eras, when they were in good health and enjoyed passable financial circumstances.
I’ve been surprised at how comparatively well (apart of course from the blessings of modern medicine) the middle classes managed to live. Many members of the middle class of the 1890’s seem to have enjoyed the ownership or use of summer homes or cottages which they accessed by rail transport. Sometimes these were only a few dozen miles out of the city limits, sometimes, hundreds as in Chicago to Harbor Springs Michigan.
Certainly, by the late 1920’s with widespread electricity and refrigeration, clean municipal water, mass individual ownership of motor vehicles, ease of maintaining cleanliness, and kitchen ranges and radios … people had a tolerable base to work and live from.
Someone ought to create a reality TV show to see how modern folks would adapt to living at a 1932 level of technology (considered at its peak). Of course the larger setting and social context which gave the situation personal meaning would be missing. Maybe it could be done in a restored village, and offered as a vacation, of sorts.
Hell, you go hunting for two weeks in a remote cabin … what level of civilization are you daily living at there?
DNW,
The BBC produced a program a couple years ago called ‘Victorian Slum House’ where a group of modern people lived in London East End conditions during the Victorian era. They built buildings and sets and the whole deal. I think it also aired in the US on some PBS stations.