Post by Bannanachair on Dec 20, 2018 13:28:47 GMT -4
So I've been doing a lot of work on ancestry.com over the past few years, looking at obscure parts of my family history going back hundreds of years (mostly on my mother's side because most records on my dad's side were destroyed during the pogroms, or, alternately, I don't speak the various languages of the former Russian and Austrian-Hungarian Empires plus Yiddish). However, for the first time in a while, I decided to take a look at my recent ancestry and fill it out with data, and I realised something striking: My family has absurdly long life expectancies.
My mother's mother's mother, my great-grandmother Kathleen, lived until she was 97 and I was 13. She was the longest-lived of my great-grandparents, but surprisingly not the only one that I met in my lifetime. My dad's mother's mother, my great-grandmother Selma, died in 2001 when I was 1 and she was 84. I thought for a long time that I was incredibly lucky to have lived alongside two of my great-grandmothers, albeit briefly. I also knew for a fact that I nearly lived alongside my great-grandmother Kathleen's husband, whose name became my middle name because he died at 87 like a week before I was born.
Lately, for two reasons, I realised that there are two more incredibly long-lived members of my family. While filling in my family tree initially I had just accepted census records without actually looking at the numbers, just verifying that they referred to the correct person. I realised just tonight that my great-grandmother Selma's husband, my great-grandfather Herbert, died in 1998 just two years before I was born at the age of 88. Furthermore, a long-lost memory of looking through my grandmother's old photos and seeing that my aunt (my dad's older sister) had known her great-grandmother Pauline has come back to me upon seeing that. Great-great grandma Pauline was born in 1885 in Russia, lived through the plot of the movie Fiddler on the Roof as a kid, escaped the pogroms, emigrated to America, naturalised and then met my aunt, who I'll conservatively say was born between 1963 and 1965. My aunt was not a baby in that picture, though I know that my dad's middle name is named after great-great grandma Pauline, so she likely passed away before 1970. I'd guess that she passed away in the late 1960s at an age of about 82-83.
Now, why does this mean that my grandmothers will live forever, you may be wondering? Because four of the five people that I mentioned are the parents of my grandmothers, and one is the grandmother of one of my grandmothers. My grandmothers are both in as close to perfect health as you can get if you're old enough to have lived through goddamn world war two - that is to say, old person stuff has only just started to effect them, and then it's just things like needing glasses to read and having a sore ankle occasionally. Add to that modern technology and medicine that wasn't available even twenty years ago (not to mention not available to great-great grandma Pauline fifty years ago, who lived through all of that!) and my grandmothers will both live forever.
My mother's mother's mother, my great-grandmother Kathleen, lived until she was 97 and I was 13. She was the longest-lived of my great-grandparents, but surprisingly not the only one that I met in my lifetime. My dad's mother's mother, my great-grandmother Selma, died in 2001 when I was 1 and she was 84. I thought for a long time that I was incredibly lucky to have lived alongside two of my great-grandmothers, albeit briefly. I also knew for a fact that I nearly lived alongside my great-grandmother Kathleen's husband, whose name became my middle name because he died at 87 like a week before I was born.
Lately, for two reasons, I realised that there are two more incredibly long-lived members of my family. While filling in my family tree initially I had just accepted census records without actually looking at the numbers, just verifying that they referred to the correct person. I realised just tonight that my great-grandmother Selma's husband, my great-grandfather Herbert, died in 1998 just two years before I was born at the age of 88. Furthermore, a long-lost memory of looking through my grandmother's old photos and seeing that my aunt (my dad's older sister) had known her great-grandmother Pauline has come back to me upon seeing that. Great-great grandma Pauline was born in 1885 in Russia, lived through the plot of the movie Fiddler on the Roof as a kid, escaped the pogroms, emigrated to America, naturalised and then met my aunt, who I'll conservatively say was born between 1963 and 1965. My aunt was not a baby in that picture, though I know that my dad's middle name is named after great-great grandma Pauline, so she likely passed away before 1970. I'd guess that she passed away in the late 1960s at an age of about 82-83.
Now, why does this mean that my grandmothers will live forever, you may be wondering? Because four of the five people that I mentioned are the parents of my grandmothers, and one is the grandmother of one of my grandmothers. My grandmothers are both in as close to perfect health as you can get if you're old enough to have lived through goddamn world war two - that is to say, old person stuff has only just started to effect them, and then it's just things like needing glasses to read and having a sore ankle occasionally. Add to that modern technology and medicine that wasn't available even twenty years ago (not to mention not available to great-great grandma Pauline fifty years ago, who lived through all of that!) and my grandmothers will both live forever.