# Great/Grandparents and What We Learn From Them



## AgentOrange5 (Sep 14, 2020)

So, when I first found this forum and was reading through it, I agreed that it seemed obvious our history had been altered. But my thinking was it had to have been done way in the past. The idea that it could have been altered as recently as 150 years, or even sooner, didn't make any sense to me. Because I'm old enough, that my grandparents were all born within 1900 - 1915. My thinking was, of course they would have told me if history had suddenly been rewritten. Even if they hadn't experienced it directly, their own parents/grandparents would have told them of any major rewriting in their recent history.

But would they?

I've been thinking about this. And my gut reaction doesn't really mesh up with reality. 

1 set of my grandparents, including my most educated grandparent who graduated high school (the only one of my grandparents to have done so), absolutely hated history. They refused to talk about it. If I ever brought it up, they would not answer any questions, say the past didn't matter, I should be concerned with the present, yada yada yada. My parent likewise never learned any history from them, justifying it as talking about history with my grandparents brought up bad memories of family members who had died very young, so that was why they never talked about it.

My other set of grandparents, were seemingly uneducated, rural folk. 1 had graduated from 8th grade, 1 had quit school long before that. They knew plenty of local history....which was solely about their rural area. They talked about crops, and other family members and what they were presently doing, and had stories of my parent growing up. They never talked about history outside of their own farm and children growing up. At the time, I assumed because they never graduated high school, and of course they didn't have TV or even radio when they were growing up, that they just didn't know anything about history. And that may possibly be true. Or maybe they just didn't want to talk about it. In retrospect, these grandparents while perhaps not formally educated, weren't exactly uneducated.  They owned a surprisingly large number of books for uneducated rural farmers (mostly fictional classics), that they said they had read.  They religiously read the newspaper and watched the news on TV (by the time I came along.) They knew what was going on in the world, but they never discussed it. 

Which makes me wonder, how common is this? Anyone here who has grandparents/great-grandparents from the turn of the century, what kind of stories did your grandparents tell? Did they avoid history? Or maybe they didn't avoid it but their stories sounded text-book like? 

We trust our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents....maybe some of them knew a whole lot more than they let on. It's easy to speculate that if indeed they were aware of evil people co-opting history, that they would have kept quiet for their own safety and for their families safety. 

My grandparents are all dead. But if history were co-opted as recently as 150 years ago, there are surely people still alive who have knowledge (as least 2nd hand knowledge) of what the truth may be. (at least for the most recent history "reset".)





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## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: cheapDate: 2018-11-21 11:38:35Reaction Score: 12


look at kids today and what they believe with this controlled media. Maybe it is the same thing that happened in the past. Maybe like today only a fraction of the population can see our fabricated history. 

It's still happing right now in front of us.


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## BStankman (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: BStankmanDate: 2018-11-21 12:10:57Reaction Score: 12


More oral histories need to be shared.

Plenty of poverty and depression stories. 
And you kids today have it too easy, right before you are given something you didn't ask for.
No history of orphans, but plenty of child labor.

They could be lying for your own good.
I suspect everyone went to the rapture, and they were left behind because they took the mark of the beast.
People were a lot tougher back then.


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## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: UnusualBeanDate: 2018-11-21 14:36:19Reaction Score: 20


I never got the chance to learn much of anything from my grandparents, but I've learned some interesting things from my parents by reading between the lines. There seems to be this weird brainwashing that causes them to come to conclusions about the past that aren't backed up at all by the stories they share. I've found it's better to ask more roundabout questions instead of direct interrogation.

One of the bigger things I've gleaned is that it was totally normal (albeit less common) for women to be property owners and heads of households around the turn of the century. Being a homemaker was also considered akin to a profession and was well respected, and educated women were considered better than uneducated women. Basically the entire narrative that women were kept barefoot and pregnant and weren't allowed to progress past middle school is totally false.


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## Ishtar (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: IshtarDate: 2018-11-21 17:17:23Reaction Score: 12


I was raised by one set of grandparents, who although smart, independent and educated, were the type to believe and trust everything the government told them. Our family history seemed very clear and detailed, but as I got older, many of the stories changed...I realized I couldn't trust oral history from the over-medicated boomer generation. My grandmother also seemed to be triggered by anything “weird” or unusual and was upset by my questions about family ethnicity (They’re from the Ozarks btw, and definitely have both native and aristocratic heritage). My own reseach into the family tree is pulling up descrepancies with genealogy as well. My memory of great-grandparents was that they all had a very harsh and concerned nature, which my grandmother attributed to them living through The Great Depression. Even she carried that family trauma, being somewhat of a hoarder.

My other side of the family is full of a lot of unknowns, orphanages, and military weirdness.

My other related thoughts on this tie into Mandela Effect and Dreams, so I’ll save it for an esoteric thread if we ever make one.


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## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: TonepDate: 2018-11-21 17:35:24Reaction Score: 13


interesting thread, i have wondered about this too.  i think we will find what _@Ishtar_ said (full of a lot of unknowns, orphanages, and military weirdness) is a common thread everywhere.  I don't know anything about my great-grands except one of the patriachs had a lot of kids, like 21.  and he was a sharecropper.  I'm black (African-American or whatever) so u know my history as told to us is we were slaves so...deadend there.


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## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: ParacelsusDate: 2018-11-21 17:40:55Reaction Score: 7


I actually did meet my paternal great-grandmother. She was born in 1906 in Baselga de Piné, Italy. Never actually spoke with her aside from greetings, she just seemed senile, or hard of hearing. Either way, I never gleaned any interesting historical information firsthand.

Being obsessively curious and inquisitive is most often a rare trait in families. I'm the solitary anomaly in mine.

* Forgot to add, my dad tried to connect with grandma Jo too. With him she was always fairly aloof. However, his maternal grandmother was fairly interesting. She was a heavy drinker that came from a German pioneer family that settled in Denver back in the 1860's- 1870's. My Irish side came over in 1856 from Athlone and settled in Wisconsin, South-Side Chicago and Denver. For whatever reason, most of my family ended up in Colorado. We are mountain people.


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## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: GroundhogLfeDate: 2018-11-21 17:48:12Reaction Score: 9


My stories heard first hand pretty much coincide with the written history since the 1930's and there's nothing to contest. Though I've never heard much war stories of actually being on the battlefield like some other families have, just that my father was pretty much forced to move as a refugee from Karelia to middle of Finland when the Soviet threat became high in WW2.

I don't believe history can be changed that fast without a conquest and state oppression, but it can be re-written with changing it a bit from generation to generation with school books. It is the parents obligation to know what is being taught to your children and if you're not interested in that, well that's your loss.

Even without a conquest history can be revisioned after some generations of an incident at ease with an agenda by promoting certain aspects that to whitewash some other important narrative away. The digital world will make this all much easier to even change and edit photos and maps and all to fit and make a narrative believable with forged evidence.

Great topic that also supports to look for other narratives for legends and oral tradition as the written sources could've been burned away.


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## Onthebit (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: OnthebitDate: 2018-11-21 18:26:08Reaction Score: 10


I think education was a bit different pre 1960.....my mother 'only' had grade 9 but she was an accomplished seamstress/chef/typist etc.  I mean she had skills we don't have unless we go to college.  She joined the airforce as a young woman and jumped out of perfectly good airplanes.  Then she got pregnant, dismissed from the military and from her catholic family.  Such a disgrace?  She fled to Ontario where she met my father whom she promptly married to absolve herself from the horrible sin of having a child out of wedlock.  She had to flee because back then if you weren't married the province took the child.


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## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: TonepDate: 2018-11-21 18:59:38Reaction Score: 8


its seems most people families in this world dont remember anything past the 1900's


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## Wildfire2000 (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: WildFire2000Date: 2018-11-21 21:05:09Reaction Score: 13


My only surviving grandparent had a stroke of some kind due to stress sometime last year and the only thing she can remember about history and the past is the standard history that I already was taught. I wanted to talk to her about the past (she was born in 1929) and the late 1930's and through WW2 and everything, but I didn't question the past until it was too late. However, from what I've noticed from other older people, when they DO talk about the past, it was either 1) too traumatic and they don't really want to discuss it, or 2) They retell things based on what the media and 'common history' tells them already, and by that I mean they tell by having you fill in information, they say 'Well, we heard X, but ...' and then it's left that "We didn't really know, so what you're taught must be right, because information wasn't as reliable back then," and then it's dropped. That's the way all of my conversations have gone with the older generation.

We also have to consider that the normalization of history occurred in the early 1900's with ... and I can't remember his name. He published a book on the complete history of the world to the present, and it solidified itself within Western culture as THE definitive stream-lined approach to what happened in the past. I cannot for the life of me remember who wrote it, but he's famous and I know I've seen him discussed on this forum. Anyway, point of it all is that even our grandparents would have been presented with the normalization as early as the 1940's. So...


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## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: Will I amDate: 2018-11-22 00:13:31Reaction Score: 13




AgentOrange5 said:


> So, when I first found this forum and was reading through it, I agreed that it seemed obvious our history had been altered. But my thinking was it had to have been done way in the past. The idea that it could have been altered as recently as 150 years, or even sooner, didn't make any sense to me. Because I'm old enough, that my grandparents were all born within 1900 - 1915. My thinking was, of course they would have told me if history had suddenly been rewritten. Even if they hadn't experienced it directly, their own parents/grandparents would have told them of any major rewriting in their recent history.
> 
> But would they?
> 
> ...


My thoughts are the more education you receive the less likely you are to see what is really going on. I wish I knew what I know now 30 years ago so could have asked my grand parents about their views of what was going on. I don't even know if they would have had a clue to what was happening as I'm sure deceit has been going on for more than just a couple generations.


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## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: ParacelsusDate: 2018-11-22 03:17:32Reaction Score: 10




Will I am said:


> My thoughts are the more education you receive the less likely you are to see what is really going on. I wish I knew what I know now 30 years ago so could have asked my grand parents about their views of what was going on. I don't even know if they would have had a clue to what was happening as I'm sure deceit has been going on for more than just a couple generations.


Right before my paternal grandfather died I had a good conversation with him about my generation (millenial) and Facebook, cellphones, and modern dating. He knew I was a jock, so he could relate to me about sports and competition. But the utter superficiality of millenials was largely incomprehensible to him. Clearly, the most obvious agenda we can see being pushed is artificiality/simulacra: VR, Immersive videogames/pornography, smart appliances, wearable electronics, multi-platform integration.

I'm 32 and find myself saying in some Clint Eastwood Man With No Name voice - what the hell is Kik and Whatsapp?

I sure as hell don't believe our salvation comes from computers!


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## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: MoshtradamusDate: 2018-11-22 03:35:49Reaction Score: 11


My grandpa (dad’s side) was born in 1928 in rural West Virginia. I’m talking... cabin in the woods, had a hidden moonshine still, washed their clothes in the creek.

My mother was very interested in his family history that he could share, being as it was so different than her side coming over here from Italy in about 1899 (my great grandma stayed in Italy, and no one even seems to know why. Not even my mom’s still living aunts. No history shared there.) I’ve recently been able to track them as far back as 1736, still living in the same county as my grandfather grew up in. The only issue was my mom got absolutely nothing from Pop. Nothing to the point where he did not even know what his grandparents first names were. I got this information from scratch. He wasn’t a stupid man. He was well spoken, owned his own business until age 75 when he passed it to my uncle. He just... didn’t know anything at all.

There’s “word of mouth” history, such as a friendly run in with Jesse James staying with them and the fact that we came over here to New Orleans (although I can’t for the life of me get past WV 1736...) from France after being in the king’s (who even knows which one!?) inner circles. Even the little bit of info on that that is vague and lacking, nor can I even get close to confirming it.

On both sides they just didn’t pass things down or share any histories... Even if me, my parents, aunts and uncles, etc tried to get anything out of anyone they would just completely brush you off. Even one generation in, no one passed down speaking Italian once they got here. It’s a little comforting to know this wasn’t the reaction in only my family. I have to wonder why...


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## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: cheapDate: 2018-11-22 08:25:28Reaction Score: 6


it would be very interesting to hear what oral traditions have been passed down by this tribe. 

Isolated Tribe Kills American With Bow and Arrow on Remote Indian Island


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## Verity (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: VerityDate: 2018-11-23 12:33:47Reaction Score: 13




AgentOrange5 said:


> So, when I first found this forum and was reading through it, I agreed that it seemed obvious our history had been altered. But my thinking was it had to have been done way in the past. The idea that it could have been altered as recently as 150 years, or even sooner, didn't make any sense to me. Because I'm old enough, that my grandparents were all born within 1900 - 1915. My thinking was, of course they would have told me if history had suddenly been rewritten. Even if they hadn't experienced it directly, their own parents/grandparents would have told them of any major rewriting in their recent history.
> 
> But would they?
> 
> ...


My grandmother was a bit of a hardarse- both of them actually but in entirely different ways. 
One was an artist, slightly wild from wealth with an interesting family line that can be traced way back to Scottish nobility in the 1000's (but how far back is it really?), and an English side of her family was recorded in the Domesday book (Domus Dei Book- what a subject, and how far back was THAT really?). 
She died when I was around four but I liked her because she smiled right in my eyes once and I've never forgotten that look. Deeply memorable.

The other grandmother was modest, educated, kept beautiful roses, married an archdeacon and was a seriously moralising victorian. 
Her side kept records dating from the 1600's through male heirs in a chest of documents/drawings/pictures/anecdotes etc., but- although recently compiled in to a published book by my uncle- I've not yet received my copy.

I learned more from the victorian-standards grandmother simply because she lived longer and;
 I quite simply rejected everything she said while she lived due to my expensive and extensive education. So did my mother, and so did I reject my mothers version too. So that's three generations, highly educated, blown to bits. I'm using my young daughter as an experiment in homeschooling- whether it changes that dynamic I'll know in about fifteen years.

Once our language had no written form, and I'm starting to see the wisdom in that.
There's something funny about the priest class writing the KJB, introducing modern English, wiping out the pagan/runic alphabet- effectively taking control and getting everyone literate on their phonetic terms.
I also see the wisdom in home-schooling if one actually wants to keep the family together. No guarantees of course.
But there is something so very sinister within that education system. All of the modern systems, food, farming, medicine etc., but particularly that.

The victorian grandmother rejected tv (apart from news and live cricket), film, the stage and the YELLOW PERIL. 
She also used to say- much to my utmost horror- that 'blacks' should be left alone in their own countries to work things out for themselves, and ought to be shot when they run amok in white countries. 
This was in peak 'Feed the World' propaganda late 80's early 90's and my shock could not have been more intense; we were milling around in a haberdasher (British version- she wasn't trans  ) while she bought some dress fabric and I remember locking eyes with my sister, our mouths agape. Will never forget- we were so embarrassed, but to her it was casual honesty and common sense.

My sister and I used to huddle together and whisper what an absolute 'racist' she was, how could our mother even be related to such a racist.
She knew the threat was there back in the 1940's I suppose because her parents would have been concerned, but she couldn't have said anything to anyone in the 80's/90's without modern education slamming her 'opinion.' 
She was so forthright, so morally sound in all ways that we really couldn't say anything to her face.
It's very strange, clever and sinister the way we've been divided.. and conquered? Almost..


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## Whitewave (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: whitewaveDate: 2018-11-23 18:55:40Reaction Score: 15


There was a lot of social pressure back in the day and people generally kept things to themselves. It wasn't until Phil Donahue came up with his tell-all show that spilling your guts to total strangers came in vogue. My family history was hidden from me but I'm nosey and sussed it out for myself. My great grandmother was Cherokee but could pass for Caucasian. My grandmother (her daughter) only verified that tidbit when I was in my 20's and confronted her with the evidence. She told me that it was for safety because you could kill a "half-breed" but killing a white woman would get you in trouble. My grandmother could pass for Caucasian and she never even told her husband that she was "half-breed" (what an ugly term!) because in her day it was actually illegal to marry outside your race. That story made me cry. She had to cut off ties with her parents in case someone found out which is about the saddest thing ever. I met my great grandmother when I was 5 and she made such an impression on me that she's the reason I got into foraging, herbal medicine and became a nurse.

My father's side of the family were German but changed their name to something more English sounding during WWII because you didn't want to be a German-American in America during WWII. So a lot of my family history has been hidden from me. The stories of my parents/grandparents were carefully selected to be generic stories that wouldn't reveal their secrets.

I've worked with the elderly and listened to their stories but their generation just didn't divulge personal information. Some sort of social taboo. Mainly they'll tell you stories of the wars they were in or the domestic life they lived but rocking the historical boat is just not done. You don't question the authorities official version; in fact, I don't think they ever even thought to do so. More trusting, naive generation.


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## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: UnusualBeanDate: 2018-11-23 22:20:39Reaction Score: 17




whitewave said:


> Cherokee but could pass for Caucasian.


This is something that's currently in the process of being rewritten, but your great grandmother probably _was_ actually Caucasian, just not "white" by the racial standards of the time. "White" classification has made a lot of transformations over the years, and even today people still argue about whether all light skinned Caucasians are "white" or not.

Anyway, the Cherokee and surrounding peoples weren't a fully homogeneous bunch, but they were _mainly _of Mediterranean descent. That's why there are so many modern Americans with family stories of Cherokee and etc. ancestry whose DNA results tell them "No, you're Jewish!" or "No, you're Spanish!" etc. This is also the case in my family. We have verifiable Native ancestry, and not a small amount of it either, but my DNA test looks like somebody closed their eyes and threw darts at a map of Eurasia. It's something you see whispered about in the corners of the internet, but people really don't talk about it in real life. Even tribes don't really talk about it. You're family or you're not, and race is only an issue if you're _not._

Example of a full blooded Cherokee girl from a century ago:




At the time they described her looks as "Grecian". They _knew._


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## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: ParacelsusDate: 2018-11-24 02:24:35Reaction Score: 7




UnusualBean said:


> This is something that's currently in the process of being rewritten, but your great grandmother probably _was_ actually Caucasian, just not "white" by the racial standards of the time. "White" classification has made a lot of transformations over the years, and even today people still argue about whether all light skinned Caucasians are "white" or not.
> 
> Anyway, the Cherokee and surrounding peoples weren't a fully homogeneous bunch, but they were _mainly _of Mediterranean descent. That's why there are so many modern Americans with family stories of Cherokee and etc. ancestry whose DNA results tell them "No, you're Jewish!" or "No, you're Spanish!" etc. This is also the case in my family. We have verifiable Native ancestry, and not a small amount of it either, but my DNA test looks like somebody closed their eyes and threw darts at a map of Eurasia. It's something you see whispered about in the corners of the internet, but people really don't talk about it in real life. Even tribes don't really talk about it. You're family or you're not, and race is only an issue if you're _not._
> 
> ...


My maternal grandfather was half Cherokee, born on a reservation in Oklahoma and looked Italian. All of my mom's side has extensive Cherokee heritage, while they weren't necessarily "proud" of it, they certainly weren't ashamed. 

Cherokee genetics definitely present unique physical features, both my mom and I are fairly blonde-ish and small boned. No-one on my dad's side could be described as small boned and fair-featured whatsoever, but I ended up with all of their athletic ability.

From what my mom has told me from her grandparents The Trail of Tears was a very real event for their grandparents. Savages getting shit-canned to badlands, probably made me tougher for it.


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## Sylvanus777 (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: Silvanus777Date: 2018-11-25 21:37:46Reaction Score: 15


My grandparents on both sides were simple countryfolk. Simple, honest, hard working people that toiled night and day and withstood the harshest of circumstances in times of world war, scarcity and hardships of all kinds - they are the reason I am even here and I have gratitude for that.

I did not know my paternal grandfather (born 1914), who was a shoemaker and small time farmer (for self-sufficiency, one or two cows and a few hens I believe). He committed suicide way before I was born. The shame of that and the ensuing hardships of raising 5 children alone must have changed my paternal grandmother (born in '22), and she did not much talk about the past. In fact she tried to cover many of it up really. So I didn't get much information about the past or family history from that side, to my dismay. I always was very inquisitive, which annoyed my grandma greatly. Never ask too many questions!

On the maternal side the picture looked differently: Grandfather and grandmother were born in 1922 and '27 respectively and both come from the same extended family (4th cousins) of farmers. In general, in my area of rural upper Austria, up until WW2 I would say the "genetic pool" was very much geographically confined, to put it politely. Meaning everyone married someone either from the same countryside town or from the neighboring ones. People didn't get around a lot then. To be taken to the county hospital some 25 km away used to be a huge deal in the 30s, 40s and 50s.

I have very similar feelings about my (maternal) grandparents as _@Verity_ described. They are both dead now, but I will always remember them as outstandingly forthright, morally sound, common-sense and warm-hearted individuals. Able to find pleasure and satisfaction in the simple things of life. This sort of people has simply been "discontinued", to use some cynicism. You don't find these anymore. To this very day it boggles my mind and invokes nothing but the deepest respect for my grandparents thinking how Grampa had his friends blown up next to him in Russia, survived Stalingrad, hiked back from there on foot only to go through some more war trauma and artrocities, lost his younger brother of 16, AND STILL, in he and many of his generations I experienced as the most kind, mentally stable and morally sound people I ever met. Same for the women going through wartime at home, like my grandma.

He had hardly any formal education, having started to work as a indentured servant at 6 or 7, but Grampa was a wellspring of old stories and now lost knowledge regarding the old way of living, the land and the people in his immediate surroundings. He had an unfailing memory as it seems, and he seemed to remember his war years day by day as it seems. It deeply saddens me that I missed my chance of writing it all down, when he passed away in an unexpected accident.

Over here as well, orally-transmitted knowledge of anything prior to 1900 is hardly extant. An elderly relative of mine whose family valued passing on these stories a bit more still can tell some odd stories from WWI, and reports about French soldiers in the Napoleonic Wars camping on the grassland next to their farmhouse. In general, the Napoleonic Wars is the farthest living memory seems to reach back in my neck of the woods. The "Blue Frights" as they called that of old, for reason of the blue uniforms.

What saddens me the most in regard of lost knowledge is the purging or at least neutering of what I consider my native language, and the original tongue of common folk Austrians, which I consider successfully accomplished. Austrians to this day, mostly the folks outside of the capitol Vienna, speak a rather strong German dialect of one sort or another. However much of it has been curtailed in its fulness and richness, ever since compulsory schooling was first forced upon the people up to today. Even I remember how standard German was drilled into my head back in school, and that in the 90s/early 2000s and my old German professor HATED the dialect with a passion. I can only marvel (and despair) at the wealth of language that has been systematically destroyed. You can gather bits and pieces from old town chronicles and local folkloristic publication, and of course my Grandpa would have known it all (but he died almost 20 years ago), and it is fascinating how seemingly all birds, all beetles, all plants and specific things would used to have completely different names from today, sounding outlandish even to my 31 year old ears.

Well, I could go on forever. These very localized Austrian dialects are still beautiful. They are very archaic and according to what I have seen, the (somewhat watered down) one I speak has very much in common with Old High German - a language alledgedly spoken in some elusive distant dark ages. Probably one reason why not only here, but around the worlds dialects have been and are being purged, and sanitized or even unified standard languages advanced....


Maternal grandma's household and neighbours gathering for threshing wheat with steam enging as customary (early 1930s, Upper Austria)


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## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: Ice NineDate: 2018-11-25 23:33:34Reaction Score: 10


Your grandparents sounds so much like mine, in their strength of character and I never heard a disparaging word come out of my maternal grandma's mouth. and strangely enough my grandpa commited suicide too, but he was 88.  Pictures I've seen of them in their youth, late teens early 1920s, and later, they look like depression era people. They had some tough times.  My other grandparents were nice people, but more affluent.
My favorite grandparents where the salt of the earth, just like yours appear to be.

I often think of my one grandma and try to be nicer and kinder to people, even if some don't deserve it.


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## Whitewave (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: whitewaveDate: 2018-11-26 01:19:33Reaction Score: 14


Interesting about the language, Silvanus. You're not the first person I've heard with that similar story. I quit worrying about how I sounded to others (strong Okie accent, yall) when I was 20 and Carter was prez. Some reporter asked the president about his accent and he responded, "I'm the president of the united states-I don't have an accent; you do" which earned him a hearty round of applause and raucous laughter.

Other than grandparents, I've found an alternate source of information from that age: online google books which is transferring newspapers of the times from microfiche to pdf. Their newspapers were folksie with readers digest type stories, poems, news of travelers, stories of deceased that went with the obituaries, corny and possibly dangerous medical advertisements, wholesome jokes, etc. There's all kinds of little tidbits in those newspapers that relate to what we're researching here. In fact, I was reading through one of the papers today dated 1850 and there was reminiscing about THEIR grandparents generation (1700's!). 

There were alerts in St. Louis that 20-90% of the population in certain towns in Missouri had died of cholera! Same news from New York. There are announcements of new inventions and stories of "important" people who've returned from their travels to Turkey and what they saw and experienced there. Doesn't sound anything like what we know of Turkey today, sadly. I heard no racism about the foreign brown people and nothing but fascination for their culture and admiration for their lifestyle in the article.

Really, those old newspapers are a wealth of information. You can see social reform starting in some of the editorial pieces. There was a 2 page article on what constitutes a virtuous woman and how she should behave and what constitutes a good wife and how she should behave. (Nothing on how a gentleman or man of honor should behave- don't get me started). In between the adverts and the moralizing was a small snippet of an article talking about "what's good for the goose is good for the gander" and said that men and women should be equal. What a concept! Hope the writer wasn't burned at the stake.

Lot of world politics and comments from "important" people who visited with foreign dignitaries. There was a blasting article about the Tsarina Anne and her famed cruelty with an example of said cruelty. I read those old papers for about 3 hours and never once encountered the word "slave". Heard about how a socialite was seen onboard a cruise vessel with her "2 colored attendants". Maybe the writers were just being polite? This was written 10 years before the Civil War and there are no stories of civil unrest/racial tensions/slavery/economic upheaval due to free labor of the South. The Odd Fellows organization seemed to be extremely wealthy taking up a lot of page space and discussing their extravagant buildings in every paper I read. 

Anyway, if no grandparents left then check out the pdf of what was going on in your grandparents time. If you find the article about vampirism and lycanthropy verified by 3 medical Drs. and multiple witnesses, shoot me a PM with your opinion. I was floored!


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## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: SawdyDate: 2018-11-26 05:53:08Reaction Score: 12


My Grandpa passed away more than 15 years ago.  He was a big news junkie but never agreed with the spin on politics they spew out on the CBC.  But he would watch it everyday.  
I never talked with him much as a kid and into my early adulthood.  And then he died.  I would have enjoyed conversations with him now.  He crossed over from East to West Germany, moving from town to town and getting though checkpoints by finding out the name of the mayor in the next town, all under the guise of bringing them a live chicken for their dinner.  He helped a whole family make the illegal crossing at night, but that is all I know because the stories aren't shared.
My Grandma is still alive but has never really been able to talk about anything about WWII.  Life was hard for her in Germany and she worked very hard to lose her German accent when she came to Canada.  Her mother had Alzheimer's and reverted to speaking Yiddish.  She passed this info off to me one day that she couldn't understand it but her older sister knew how to speak it.  She then swept it under the rug by saying the neighbors spoke it and that is how they learned it.
My other Grandparents are gone.  My Great-Grandpa lived to 103 but I was a teen and not interested in conversing with him.  He was from Poland but spoke Ukrainian I believe.  The other set of Greats on that side came from Ukraine.  My one Grandpa was born in the Ukraine.  My Dad's first language was Ukrainian until he started school.
So there is so much interesting that I would have loved to know or find out and now I can't.  But it wasn't like the told their stories much.  It hurts to talk about the past.

My husband's Grandfather wrote down his life story before he passed.  But he whitewashed it in the process.  The time spent serving in WWII has been shortened to only the highlights he wished to share with his daughters.  According to his memoirs he wrote his wife every week and kept those letters until retirement when he destroyed them.  I wonder if they would have not been as whitewashed.  Or perhaps they were because he would have got in trouble to share anything that could be intercepted.  I would've liked to meet him and discuss things if he was still alive today.

Nobody likes to talk about the past with Millennials like me.  They think we all don't care.  I wonder if that is how other generations felt about generations like the baby boomers or the generations preceding them.  We all probably get arrogant when we take first year Arts degrees and get inundated with history classes.


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## Sylvanus777 (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: Silvanus777Date: 2018-11-26 07:52:10Reaction Score: 19




whitewave said:


> I heard no racism about the foreign brown people and nothing but fascination for their culture and admiration for their lifestyle in the article.


I got several years worth of an old magazine in book form, years 1899 - 1907 or so, which my grampa secured when they tore down the old parochial house decades ago. This one was printed in Bohemia, while it was still part of Austro-Hungary, and aimed at catholicas in then Austria and Germany. I can report the same thing: Similar travel reports or reports by missionaries to Africa and elsewhere and no racism whatsoever, only fascination and respect for dark skinned people, their culture and lifestyle. Same thing with the moralizing and the well-meaning, practical living advice for children, women and even men! My God, everything in these magazines is so innocent, so benevolent,  healthy and good-natured and un-corrupted. Two world wars / mass slaugther rituals and 70 years of toxic social engineering really tore us "Westerners" down to the gutter (mentally/morally/spiritually)...


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## BStankman (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: BStankmanDate: 2018-11-26 10:04:42Reaction Score: 5


Great stories getting shared here.

Got some more details over the holidays.
Pittsburgh 1918, two deaths in the the family.  One an infant, the other fourteen.
Taken away by carts and not buried in the family plot.





Other side, my grandfather was in the paramilitary Civilian Conservation Corps during the depression.




Later got thrown out of the Army and became a Hobo like Don Draper.
A lifestyle in the US that goes back to the civil war, possibly native American.




Both odd periods of US history that need more research.

He was the first born in the US from immigrants.  
The family name is most common in Macedonia, which is not the country they said they were from.
There is the possibility they were refugees from this.  Balkan Wars - Wikipedia
I did meet my great grandmother when very young and can remember her speaking some kind of Slavic language.


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## Sylvanus777 (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: Silvanus777Date: 2018-11-26 10:34:52Reaction Score: 13


Oh one more interesting anecdote from my paternal family side:

During WW2 the Austrian countryside took in many ethnic German refugees from the east. During that time, my paternal grandparents took in a couple of so called "Volga Germans" that had come from the Volga region fleeing persecution by Stalin. Friedrich Weimer (name must derive from the city of Weimar in Germany I would think) and his Russian wife Anastasia. They lived with my father's family until the 1960 and stayed in close contact to us even after moving to a nearby city, always being like the closes of family to us until they died around the early 2000s. Both were the most kind and caring people you could wish for, although they had their whole families brutally murdered with all property seized back in Russia. The man's only son ended up in Kasachstan, curiously. He visited 12-15 years or so ago, never heard of the guy again. Curious how people got shuffled around within the Soviet Union, the son of the displaced "Volga German" ending up in Kasachstan...

I find the fact that so many ethnic Germans, speaking the language even, used to live not only in the former eastern territories of the Habsburg monarchy (in modern Romania, Bulgaria etc.) but also deep into Russian lands, until the soviets either exterminated or displaced them.
After having read Fomenko I must concede some validity to his (partially annoying) russo-centric claims of the "Habsburg" or "Holy Roman Empire" once being united with Russia in a Greater Tartarian Empire... Makes me think. On top of that we have the strong notions among pre WWI British and other statesmen & diplomats that "Russia and Germany have to be kept from uniting at all costs". What could be behind that?? Fear of a former world power re-uniting??

I don't know, but it's definitely thrilling to make connections (conjecture?) between larger world history and bits and pieces of family history.


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## BStankman (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: BStankmanDate: 2018-11-26 11:35:05Reaction Score: 2




Ice Nine said:


> My other grandparents were nice people, but more affluent.





Ice Nine said:


> I can verify the Fort Griswold information. At Least in regards to who was fighting who.
> I had 4 cousins fighting at Fort Griswold, they all survived, even one of them who received 7 bayonet stabs, his heart could be seen beating in his chest. He was one of the very few wounded who survived. I was so surprised when a link to Fort Griswold showed up here.


@*Ice Nine*
I would love to hear any family stories on this.  Was it an revolt, or an invasion?  The memorial says conquerors.


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## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: Ice NineDate: 2018-11-26 14:41:42Reaction Score: 6


Thanks for the interest BS. I can only answer in the context of what we were handed down through time.

I got mixed up about the wounds and family members involved in the battle, it was what one Aunt had relayed to me.  But this is correct from 3 different sources. (other than my aunt)
3 Stanton's were killed, Captain Amos Stanton, Lieutenant Enoch Stanton and Sergeant Daniel Stanton ( 26 wounds) and 2 were wounded and paroled, Daniel Stanton Jr. and Edward, Edward received a terrible wound that exposed his heart, but he survived. 

The memorial says "conquerors' because the British did just that, it was one of the last major victories of the Revolutionary war, by the British.  Benedict Arnold and his troops were sent to New London to take over the port city, the British wanted it for future use to help with the war.  Arnold ended up burning the towns of New London and Groton. Besides the massacre at the Fort.

This side of my family has been here since 1635, but even this relative left out Daniel Stanton Jr, but his name is on the monument as being wounded and surviving.


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## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: WhaduzitakeDate: 2018-11-29 04:25:57Reaction Score: 7




UnusualBean said:


> I never got the chance to learn much of anything from my grandparents, but I've learned some interesting things from my parents by reading between the lines. There seems to be this weird brainwashing that causes them to come to conclusions about the past that aren't backed up at all by the stories they share. I've found it's better to ask more roundabout questions instead of direct interrogation.
> 
> One of the bigger things I've gleaned is that it was totally normal (albeit less common) for women to be property owners and heads of households around the turn of the century. Being a homemaker was also considered akin to a profession and was well respected, and educated women were considered better than uneducated women. Basically the entire narrative that women were kept barefoot and pregnant and weren't allowed to progress past middle school is totally false.


I have found this to be true as well!  Glad to see you say this.


UnusualBean said:


> This is something that's currently in the process of being rewritten, but your great grandmother probably _was_ actually Caucasian, just not "white" by the racial standards of the time. "White" classification has made a lot of transformations over the years, and even today people still argue about whether all light skinned Caucasians are "white" or not.
> 
> Anyway, the Cherokee and surrounding peoples weren't a fully homogeneous bunch, but they were _mainly _of Mediterranean descent. That's why there are so many modern Americans with family stories of Cherokee and etc. ancestry whose DNA results tell them "No, you're Jewish!" or "No, you're Spanish!" etc. This is also the case in my family. We have verifiable Native ancestry, and not a small amount of it either, but my DNA test looks like somebody closed their eyes and threw darts at a map of Eurasia. It's something you see whispered about in the corners of the internet, but people really don't talk about it in real life. Even tribes don't really talk about it. You're family or you're not, and race is only an issue if you're _not._
> 
> ...


OMG I love this post!!!  They totally circumvent the fact that no one actually "knows" where the native Americans actually came from.  If you go by appearance solely, they look Western European, like the picture above, or like they are Arab or Middle Eastern, or a mix of Oriental and Middle Eastern or Asian Indian.  It's just not politically correct to say the glaringly obvious, imho.


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## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: UnusualBeanDate: 2018-11-29 09:29:52Reaction Score: 2




Whaduzitake said:


> If you go by appearance solely, they look Western European, like the picture above, or like they are Arab or Middle Eastern, or a mix of Oriental and Middle Eastern or Asian Indian. It's just not politically correct to say the glaringly obvious, imho.


Notice how most of those regions are in or adjacent to the Mediterranean


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## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: DandiDate: 2018-12-11 14:47:34Reaction Score: 6


In my family tree it happened like this: My great grandmother was adopted and then, from the sayings of my grandma, she ran away from home - around 30km and she got married with my great grandfather that died when my grandmother was small and she can barely remember. My grandmother's brother committed suicide in the 30's. From my other side of the family my grandfather was adopted and he has his roots in Ukraine (we have no more information about from where exactly, only thing we know is that he was 4 years old when he was adopted). My other grandmother was telling us stories how her mother came from a family of single kids so there are no other cousins, uncles she had. She was saying that our great-grandmother since she knew herself she was living in that area (on the other side of the country, some little small village with no real connection to the world, the entire village is now moved because there were landslides in the 90’s, her house is long gone). Weirdly enough in both cases, the fathers of the grandmothers died when they were really young, there is only one picture with my great-grandmother with her husband but not with my grandmother.

A family friend has a similar situation in her family where the great grandmothers were said to be born in single families and they were given away for adoption and they came from really small villages.

There is a family name that is really proeminent through Romania, the “Dragoi” name. Not too many people are talking about this but I searched it awhile. It's not like the John Doe name where in romanian would be: Gheorghe Popescu.  My grandfather had 6 brothers which all have now of course the family name Dragoi but from where it originated I haven’t found out - it may be a archaic composed word from drag -meaning close to the heart and the ending -oi that was used in old times. When you say it in romanian it sounds as if it is coming from the word "dragon"

Quick question for everyone:

Would it make sense to do a heritage test? Because from one side of the family the grandparents where from opposite sides of the country and perhaps outside the romanian territory.


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## Sylvanus777 (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: Silvanus777Date: 2018-12-12 08:10:29Reaction Score: 2




Dandi said:


> There is a family name that is really proeminent through Romania, the “Dragoi” name. Not too many people are talking about this but I searched it awhile. It's not like the John Doe name where in romanian would be: Gheorghe Popescu. My grandfather had 6 brothers which all have now of course the family name Dragoi but from where it originated I haven’t found out - it may be a archaic composed word from drag -meaning close to the heart and the ending -oi that was used in old times. When you say it in romanian it sounds as if it is coming from the word "dragon"


Very interesting! I know next to nothing about the Romanian language, but do you know if there's a connection between the, as you say, common name "Dragoi" and the notoriously famous Vlad Tepes "Dracul" of the 15th century? I have no idea, but this is just a thought that came to my mind. I have some very basic knowledge of slavic languages from some Russian classes I took back at university, and I too think that the connection you made to drag, as in "close to the heart" (drug in Russian being "friend", also someone close to one's heart) would make perfect sense for a family name. However, what if "Dragoi" is a (linguistic) corruption of "Dracoi"? Now again, I know basically nothing about the Romanian language, but "-oi" can be a plural noun ending in Greek (for example "magus" = magos, plural: magoi). Could the Dragoi / Dracoi have historically been the extended family and/or descendents of Vlad Dracul??

_@Dandi_ Haha, guess I have a vivid imaginatin. Would definitely love to know more from you about this if you find out anything else about the origin of the name! I'm generally very fond of "decrypting" family names I come across.


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## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: DandiDate: 2018-12-12 09:37:46Reaction Score: 8




Silvanus777 said:


> Very interesting! I know next to nothing about the Romanian language, but do you know if there's a connection between the, as you say, common name "Dragoi" and the notoriously famous Vlad Tepes "Dracul" of the 15th century? I have no idea, but this is just a thought that came to my mind. I have some very basic knowledge of slavic languages from some Russian classes I took back at university, and I too think that the connection you made to drag, as in "close to the heart" (drug in Russian being "friend", also someone close to one's heart) would make perfect sense for a family name. However, what if "Dragoi" is a (linguistic) corruption of "Dracoi"? Now again, I know basically nothing about the Romanian language, but "-oi" can be a plural noun ending in Greek (for example "magus" = magos, plural: magoi). Could the Dragoi / Dracoi have historically been the extended family and/or descendents of Vlad Dracul??
> 
> _@Dandi_ Haha, guess I have a vivid imaginatin. Would definitely love to know more from you about this if you find out anything else about the origin of the name! I'm generally very fond of "decrypting" family names I come across.


This is very interesting
I found in this book on google "Yearbook of Morphology 1999" about this augumentative suffix -oi which sometimes is used as enhancing, oversizing, and sometimes used as a diminutive.
Another thing about Vlad Tepes -" tepes" comes from "țeapă" - which means impale (the object) but also means "to deceive" and that's a saying that is said to be in our culture since vlad tepes  . A story I know about Vlad Tepes and why was he called Dracul - was because he received a gift from the chinese emperor (which said to have negotiations with during the 1500's) a cape with a dragon on it, from which our beloved citizens of the country where saying that is the devil , "drac" - evil entity that lays in hell and does nasty things. 
Maybe one day I will get to the bottom of this family name and find out what's with this double sense of this word. Being a family name in my family it's sweet to the heart  and when I hear it it brings nice feelings inside  to note, it's written in romanian Drăgoi.
As a summery:
While we have the word "dragoste" (which means love) which makes the family name Dragoi fitting, we have also the "drac" and the augumentative  suffix -oi which also makes it fit.

Thank you very much for your insights :


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## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: Radal16Date: 2019-01-17 03:17:05Reaction Score: 9


I asked my 92 year old Grandfather a few questions over Christmas about his childhood. He grew up in a small town in Upstate NY and was the very last child to be born on the family homestead that was originally built by a German immigrant in 1750- which is still there btw, currently owned by a trust. His memory is sharp, he can remember every little detail about the farm, down to the sounds and smells. I asked him if there was any talk when he was a child about news from around the world, he said no- local news only. I asked if his parents ever talked about life when they were children and he said that they never would have done that, that wasn't the way then. If something big went down in recent history (the last 150 years or so) I would have expected that people would know from their parents or grandparents. BUT, it appears that reminiscing about the old days wasn't particularly common, at least not in my Grandfather's family. Interestingly, he remembers the beginning of segregation in the immigrant neighborhoods in his small town. That would have been in the 30's before WWII.


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## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: BrokenAgateDate: 2019-01-28 20:20:32Reaction Score: 7


My parents were pretty old when they had me--my mother was 41 and my dad was 60!--so my grandparents were all dead by the time I came along. But I have wondered about this. Wouldn't the survivors teach their children something about the mud flood, or rain of dirt, or whatever it was? Wouldn't they teach that the cities were already there, and they simply moved into them?

I'm trying to imagine how it all went down. People living normally and peacefully in their cities, and then there's a catastrophe (natural, man-made, or both) and it all gets flooded and bombed. Millions die, diseases and starvation kill even more. Then the controllers come in, and they tell people where to go and how to live from now on. Orphaned children are sent away from their homelands to become slaves on farms and in factories, families and friends are separated as their neighborhoods are destroyed to make room for newer buildings that look nothing like the old architecture. Everyone is made to work so hard that they don't have time to wonder what happened. The money they earn goes mainly to the government and utility providers, with little left for themselves. Life is a struggle every moment. Buildings are dug out of the mud, then destroyed within a few years or decades, and very soon, everyone has put the past behind them. As older people die off, there is nobody to pass on any stories, even if they wanted to recount them. Younger people have no memory of anything being different, and they aren't curious enough to ask about the past because there is work to do all the time. In schools and orphanages everywhere, they are taught a history that  never happened, and they have no reason to doubt it.

But why would older people, the grandparents and great-grandparents, not tell them the truth? Fear, I suspect. Fear of ridicule, fear of retaliation by the government, the ever-present brainwashing that has convinced them that they can't possibly know as much as the historians, and their own memories must be faulty in some way, and the trauma of having survived something that killed so many of their friends and family. 

And of course, as others have mentioned, since people didn't have transportation like we do now (or did in the past), they wouldn't have traveled very far, so they wouldn't have learned much of anything about what was going on in the world. Maybe this attitude was encouraged by the people in charge, and that's why parents and grandparents didn't discuss the olden days with their children. It just wasn't something that proper people did.


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## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: UnusualBeanDate: 2019-01-28 23:29:59Reaction Score: 6




BrokenAgate said:


> My parents were pretty old when they had me--my mother was 41 and my dad was 60!--so my grandparents were all dead by the time I came along. But I have wondered about this. Wouldn't the survivors teach their children something about the mud flood, or rain of dirt, or whatever it was? Wouldn't they teach that the cities were already there, and they simply moved into them?
> 
> I'm trying to imagine how it all went down. People living normally and peacefully in their cities, and then there's a catastrophe (natural, man-made, or both) and it all gets flooded and bombed. Millions die, diseases and starvation kill even more. Then the controllers come in, and they tell people where to go and how to live from now on. Orphaned children are sent away from their homelands to become slaves on farms and in factories, families and friends are separated as their neighborhoods are destroyed to make room for newer buildings that look nothing like the old architecture. Everyone is made to work so hard that they don't have time to wonder what happened. The money they earn goes mainly to the government and utility providers, with little left for themselves. Life is a struggle every moment. Buildings are dug out of the mud, then destroyed within a few years or decades, and very soon, everyone has put the past behind them. As older people die off, there is nobody to pass on any stories, even if they wanted to recount them. Younger people have no memory of anything being different, and they aren't curious enough to ask about the past because there is work to do all the time. In schools and orphanages everywhere, they are taught a history that  never happened, and they have no reason to doubt it.
> 
> ...


In a number of countries, if you were caught saying the wrong things you could be carted off to an insane asylum and tortured until you forgot your "delusions". Very strong motivator to feign ignorance.


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## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: BrokenAgateDate: 2019-03-19 21:36:27Reaction Score: 6


They also keep us constantly preoccupied with wars, famine, drought, poverty, and every other kind of hardship so we'll be too traumatized to feel like passing on stories to the next generations. Who wants to remember any of that? Better to just forget it and move on.


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## sleepy (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: sleepyDate: 2019-03-23 02:39:58Reaction Score: 20


a lurker for a while, but a first post as I wanted to share my grandma's thoughts since it's from a different culture than most of the replies, she's said something interesting things, and overall a different perspective. She's also terrible at lying, so I believe her.

My grandma was born in the 20s in Japan. One of her homes (they had two) was destroyed in the fire bombs in Tokyo, but she stayed at their other house in a different area sometimes, which is why she and her family survived it. When she talks about childhood, she talks about how hard it was to walk up the mountains carrying water and how her sister loved to cook the potatoes in the ground, or how her father made her wear the hats he sewed even though she didn't like it - she never talks about "horrors of war". She seems to have no real sad stories from that war time in her life, other than the fire, or when she moved to abroad (I'll get there). I don't think she's hiding anything because she is terrible at lying, and she's mentioned upsetting things like siblings that died at young ages from illness.

A few months ago right before I found this site, when I was visiting her she was watching a (Japanese silly quiz styled) TV show that was about space. One question was "how old is the universe?" and an elderly man answered "68 years, because that's when I was born. I don't know if it existed before then, so to me that's what it is", before being told the "right" answer of .. whatever trillion, then went on that explain the "correct" answer. The whole show was like this (wrong "silly" answer corrected with laughs to the current science). My grandma said she never learned any of this in school, she was fascinated and didn't believe the "real" answers.
The show talked about how the Earth revolves around the sun and the moon around the Earth, and how they're all round. My grandma was laughing because it sounded so silly to her; she was told in elementary school the Earth was round, but when she asked why water stays on the ground, no one really answered comfortably. She also said she's never heard about the "Earth around sun, moon around Earth" orbit before, and she still believes that the Earth is stationary, and the sun and Moon trade places. 
She doesn't know why the moon glows, because the idea of the sun bouncing light off of it is ridiculous to her, because of the positioning.

That was all just idle talk, but I mention it because it shows a bit of the types of things she learned (or didn't learn) in school in a standard education. Their history they were taught in school was standard, big event history of Japan in elementary school; history of surrounding areas in middle school (and they start English then); and then in high school, they branch into very, very vague world history. A lot of the subtler Japanese history she doesn't know, and a lot of big world history events she doesn't know.

He father (my great grandfather) was a college professor and inventor, and I think he probably had the same lack of modern cosmic science, or he would've corrected her.

She went to college for architecture (this is right after WWII) and worked in the military. She copied and drafted blueprints for machines she didn't know the purpose of, and sometimes tanks, then switched to clerical work on an American base because of her English.

She met my grandfather (he was in American army), got married, and they moved around between US, Germany and Japan (the Korean war happened during this time and my grandfather was stationed in Korea a couple times), and the other hardship she had was when she lived in America at first; everyone was really racist towards her. She also lost many of her belongings in a storage fire in Germany.

I think I got a little of topic, but those are the kinds of things I learn about from her. She doesn't know a lot of Western history other than what she had to learn for citizenship (which 95% she's forgotten because who needs it). There's even discrepancies in the Japanese history she knows versus the history I've learned more recently. I can't think of examples exact at the moment. We watch Japanese TV a lot, and it always prompts a lot of "I never knew that!" or "That's wrong" from her on the quiz or info ones.

This side of my family had a documented lineage that goes back hundreds of years, which is a big contrast to my other family side, which stops at great-grandparents because one says they were born on a raft in a river and refuse to talk about their history, and the other ran off someplace untraceable and no one knows anything about them.
As for my grandfather that was in the military who married her, he died when I was younger, so I never got to talk about this stuff. But I know he and his brothers were all bad alcoholics for most of their lives that they blame on the wars and being in the army.


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## Whitewave (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: whitewaveDate: 2019-03-23 04:02:19Reaction Score: 6


Thanks for sharing, sleepy, and welcome to the site. It's always enlightening to hear history as taught from other parts of the world so thanks for a different perspective.


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## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: BrokenAgateDate: 2019-03-23 16:58:02Reaction Score: 2




sleepy said:


> She went to college for architecture (this is right after WWII) and worked in the military. She copied and drafted blueprints for machines she didn't know the purpose of, and sometimes tanks, then switched to clerical work on an American base because of her English.


She sounds like an amazing woman! I'm so glad you were able to get so much information from her. It's interesting about her education, what she learned and didn't learn.  Higher education is a fairly new thing (or something that we only recently re-invented). I think many of our grandparents and great-grandparents, if they went to school at all, had a very basic education until around the age of ten or twelve: reading, maths, writing, a bit of geography and history, just enough to get by before going to work on the farm, taking up an apprenticeship, or whatever. Girls often were viewed as not needing much of an education because they were expected to get married, have children, and manage the household, not have a career in science or management. Of course, this is a generalization, but these types of stories are the ones I've read about most often. Minimal education, hard work, raise a family. So it's cool that she went to college despite seeming to have missed out on a lot in her earlier education.


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## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: Bettie29Date: 2019-03-30 10:14:18Reaction Score: 3


Just stumbled across this:

_-video does not exist any longer-_
...am I being cynical or is there something a little...off...about these recordings? Or have they just been so outstandingly restored that they look hi-res even though they’re from 1929? Anyway, interesting insight into oldies from that time period


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## Whitewave (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: whitewaveDate: 2019-03-30 12:30:22Reaction Score: 10


Nice find.  "Now the newspapers sometimes print the events a day BEFORE they happen" (6:00 mark). Being facetious or truthful?
Also, I had never heard of any U.S. war of 1859 so I looked it up. Sometimes I'm embarrassed to be American.
"Word has finally reached both Washington and London about the escalating crisis. Officials on both sides of the Atlantic were shocked that a dispute over a pig had grown into a stand off involving as many as 3 warships, 84 guns and over 2,600 men."

Something else that struck me as odd was the gentleman saying his (war) company defeated the Dutch. Not aware that U.S. fought the Dutch in the mid 1800's, I looked into it (barely) and found that while most Dutch immigrants fought on the Union side, the Confederacy was funded through the Dutch who bought their bonds. Now, why would they do that? Seems you could end a war you disagreed with by simply refusing to fund it. And why would the CSA call the German immigrants "long-eared Dutch"?

History just gets weirder and weirder.


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## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: makzpjDate: 2019-07-16 00:05:09Reaction Score: 19


I’m going to tell you about something my mother has told means that always has bothered me because it’s odd.

I live in Mexico. My mother comes from rural Mexico. At her time, there was hardly any school where she lived. Sometimes the government sent a teacher who stayed there for a few months, and then went away. Then they sent a new one for a few months...

She hardly learned how to read and write. At the time women were not required to know those things. My grand mother’s case is worse, she still lives and is 95 year old. She never learned anything about reading, writing, school or whatever.

But here comes the weird part. Apparently my great grand mother not only could read, but was an avid reader, well versed on many topics. When I ask my mother or my grand mother why my great grand mother could read they are like .

But that’s not the end of it. My great grand mother used to read stories from the Old Testament to the kids at evening. There was no tv, only radio, so this was a form of entertainment. Problem is, from what my mother recalls, there is no way this was the Old Testament.

This book had stories about the past. Including giants. And also it had prophecies. I recall it predicted cars, “bombs” under cities (my mother believes this could refer to natural gas pipes underground), cash will become useless, environmetal collapse, among other things that definitely are not on the Old Testament as we know it. It sounded more like science fiction.

Whatever that book was, it’s lost now. We might never know...


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## irishbalt (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: irishbaltDate: 2019-07-16 06:32:37Reaction Score: 7




makzpj said:


> I’m going to tell you about something my mother has told means that always has bothered me because it’s odd.
> 
> I live in Mexico. My mother comes from rural Mexico. At her time, there was hardly any school where she lived. Sometimes the government sent a teacher who stayed there for a few months, and then went away. Then they sent a new one for a few months...
> 
> ...


Sounds like you have an investigation to conduct, let us know what you find.  Mexico is full of mysteries I'm sure.


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## KD Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: KorbenDallasDate: 2019-07-16 07:03:38Reaction Score: 3




makzpj said:


> Whatever that book was, it’s lost now. We might never know...


We definitely want to know more.


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## codis (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: codisDate: 2019-07-16 08:32:24Reaction Score: 8


I never had a chance to meet my grandfathers.
One was a Luftwaffe pilot in WWII (Ju88, Fw190A) and met the fate of 95% of his fellow pilots.
He came from a rural area, married a girl from his village during war, and had a son he never saw. His widow (i.e. my grandmother) told me only very few about him and his war experiences. Only funny stories that he sometimes deviated a few mile from his route to drop dirty clothes for washing from the plane. His last assignment of defending civil and military installments in the Hannover area is well documented, as is his death. Since I grew up in the Eastern Bloc, I had a chance to visit his grave only after the fall of communism, in the '90s.
The other grandfather seemed less smart, and enlisted in the army, only to serve at the eastern front. He was once buried alive and got a shrapnel in his head, causing severe damage and making him unsuitable for further service. Only in the hospital, he met his later wife, who was doing her mandatory work service there.
She herself was from East Prussia, now Russian teritory. This grandfather suffered from repercussions of his injury during the rest of his life, and died a few weeks before I was born (mid 1960s). My grandmother never spoke about him, except in contempt. The relationship had obviously not been so good, the brain damage might have played a role (as me and my mother - her daughter - use to say).

I heard some first-hand war stories from older neighbors that served at the military, mostly about the eastern from. But I was a kid at that time, and they tailored it to kids, obviously. But even then, I realized the contradictions to the stuff I heard from communist-indoctrinated school teachers (sometimes also first-hand war experiences) and from mass media.
One of the first cognitive dissonances I ran into in my life ...


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## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: LostFriscoDate: 2019-12-13 08:38:30Reaction Score: 0




Silvanus777 said:


> Oh one more interesting anecdote from my paternal family side:
> 
> During WW2 the Austrian countryside took in many ethnic German refugees from the east. During that time, my paternal grandparents took in a couple of so called "Volga Germans" that had come from the Volga region fleeing persecution by Stalin. Friedrich Weimer (name must derive from the city of Weimar in Germany I would think) and his Russian wife Anastasia. They lived with my father's family until the 1960 and stayed in close contact to us even after moving to a nearby city, always being like the closes of family to us until they died around the early 2000s. Both were the most kind and caring people you could wish for, although they had their whole families brutally murdered with all property seized back in Russia. The man's only son ended up in Kasachstan, curiously. He visited 12-15 years or so ago, never heard of the guy again. Curious how people got shuffled around within the Soviet Union, the son of the displaced "Volga German" ending up in Kasachstan...
> 
> ...


Stalin didn’t trust the Volga Germans and wanted them away from the Crimea where they could connect with the German army. Many were deported to Kazakhstan and suffered miserably there in poverty. Others were sent to Siberia and their descendants are still there today, running farms along the rivers. They are known to be neat and tidy and efficient and prosperous in constrast to their Russian neighbors, who prefer sloth & vodka.


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## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: PazzarusDate: 2020-02-03 19:03:40Reaction Score: 2


My family tree; consist of drug dealers, thugs and killers. Always struggling, known to hustle, screaming “f**k their feelings” 

I got advice from my grandfather, and all he told me was this... “get off your ass if you want to be rich”, you see, there are 10 rules to the game, but I’ll share with you two. Know, people are gonna hate you for whatever you do. Now rule one, get your cash on (M.O.B) that is money over bitches because they breed envy. Now rule two, is a hard one, watch for phonies! Keep your enemies close, and always watch your homies. It seemed unimportant when he told me I smiled, picture jewels being handed to an innocent child.

I never knew in my lifetime I’d live by these rules, initiated as an outlaw just studying rules. Now my papa ain’t around, so I got to recall or come to grips with being


My grandfather also taught me that all religion, and just about every other mainstream thing we are led to believe is a lie. I’m pretty sure the man was trying to groom me, he was a 33rd degree before he passed, and I basically was like his son!


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## codis (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: codisDate: 2020-02-04 07:10:46Reaction Score: 1




LostFrisco said:


> Stalin didn’t trust the Volga Germans and wanted them away from the Crimea where they could connect with the German army. Many were deported to Kazakhstan and suffered miserably there in poverty. Others were sent to Siberia and their descendants are still there today, running farms along the rivers. They are known to be neat and tidy and efficient and prosperous in constrast to their Russian neighbors, who prefer sloth & vodka.


Those Volga Germans are the descendants of a friendly "population exchange" between the Russian Tsar and the Prussian king in the 18th century. At that times, both "royal" lines were still very aligned.
Russians came to Germany at the same time, and settled near the town of Potsdam. Don't know much about their fate, though.


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## KD Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: KorbenDallasDate: 2020-02-04 07:24:30Reaction Score: 1


That’s what we are being told. Half of the Russian 1812 officer corps had non-Russian last names, and served additional countries, or foreign municipalities. Who knows how it was in reality?

The dude who started Siemens lived in Georgia or thereabouts at the time, as far as I understand. Wiki does not mention it, but the info is not hard to find.


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## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: Cl4ssyMFDate: 2020-02-04 22:09:11Reaction Score: 0




whitewave said:


> Nice find.  "Now the newspapers sometimes print the events a day BEFORE they happen" (6:00 mark). Being facetious or truthful?
> Also, I had never heard of any U.S. war of 1859 so I looked it up. Sometimes I'm embarrassed to be American.
> "Word has finally reached both Washington and London about the escalating crisis. Officials on both sides of the Atlantic were shocked that a dispute over a pig had grown into a stand off involving as many as 3 warships, 84 guns and over 2,600 men."
> 
> ...


Dutch loved the slave trade so there is that.


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## codis (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: codisDate: 2020-02-05 08:47:20Reaction Score: 3




KorbenDallas said:


> That’s what we are being told. Half of the Russian 1812 officer corps had non-Russian last names, and served additional countries, or foreign municipalities. Who knows how it was in reality?


Considering the lacking loyalities of "royals" to their subjects, it would make sense to take some trustworthy military staff with them.
Anyway, besides of romanticisations, I see no very convincing reason to lie about the origins of Germans in Russia.

And if we are about that (German emmigrants), there is another strange association I had:
Perhaps some people  knowledgeable about German culture and fairytales know the recurring expression "behind the seven mountains" (German "hinter den sieben Bergen").
Seemingly., it is a metaphor for "far away".
The Snow-white fairytale is a good examples, containing "Hinter den sieben Bergen, bei den sieben Zwergen" ("... at the seven dwarfs").
What's strange, there is also a large community of German emigrants in Transsylvania, in German called "Siebenbürgen".
It seems the fact of emigration have found it's way into fairytales.
Transylvanian Saxons - Wikipedia


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## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: Son of a BorDate: 2020-02-05 17:16:25Reaction Score: 8


I have written some about my parents in the two threads I started. My daughter is in her teens now, and my wife of nearly 30 years passed away three years back. I try to share with her everything important that I can remember about her grandparents (all deceased) and her mom.  This is a pleasure for me, but I also think it is imperative morally, culturally, every which way.

For about 20 years, I lived a lot in Taiwan. My wife’s parents were very kind people. Everyone in the 20th century has been so bent into strange shapes by global forces. My mother-in-law grew up speaking the local language, Taiwanese at home; at school, she learned Japanese during the Japanese colonial period (1895-45). She met my father-in-law while studying Mandarin Chinese in the 1950s. She was the most hard working person I’ve ever met. She gave birth to five kids after WWII in wherever they were living. (My spouse was number 3, born 1960.) She got abused as a child; for the very fact that she was born number 9 of nine girls, and traditional Taiwanese highly value boys. So, she was traded by her wealthy parents for a son. She did all the chores at the new house, and it was tough. And she was tough and dedicated but really and truly kind person at heart. I think because her temper was volcanic at times, my poor wife could tolerate me...Of course, my wife inherited some of that, too...

She didn’t believe in any of the moon stuff, either. She believed in the moon lady. And she wouldn’t take pills, even when she probably/definitely should have. Her foot got crushed by a bus when she had five little ones, and my older sister-in-law took over the child care duties for a year or more while she recovered. She was in pain constantly from then on. But she still got up everyday that was not raining and prepared an entire food cart of chickens, vegetables, soups, pork, rice, sweet drinks Taiwanese like on hot days, and herbal drinks. She would push the big cart home by herself around 8PM. Take a little nap. Then clean it all up.  Clang! Clang Bang! Bang! Another nap. And then 5AM or so, she was back at the market to buy things. She would take naps during slow hours and my father-in-law told me thieves would steal from her. I think she drank too much of the sweet drinks and came down with diabetes. My father-in-law and I would try to get her to take pills for it, but she’d pretend to take them or hide them or chose only one...She died at 78 years. Who knows if she would have done better by taking the medicine? I really didn’t like see her deteriorate. But she had her ways.

She really loved to celebrate new births, weddings, and traditional holidays. Everyone had a big feast. She and my father-in-law were fantastic cooks. The understanding of variety, favor and freshness... is definitely something lost/fading nowadays.  How can people who live in unreality cooperate with reality to make splendid food?

Maybe I’ll write more about my father-lin-law later. I had many, many long conversations with him about Chinese history and his life. He was born into the landed-gentry. But that world was destroyed finally by the revolution. That’s why he ended up in Taiwan. But there is a lot to the story....


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## Clown Of God (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: Clown Of GodDate: 2020-02-05 21:35:55Reaction Score: 8


The first time I heard the term Tatar, was from my late grandpa when I was a child.Im of Croatian descent.
He had an old painting ( don’t know how old it was) with two warriors, both on horses fighting each other.Their equipment where relatively the same, swords.. helmets etc.I remember one of the warriors had a round shield with the Star of David on it.So I asked my grandpa about that particular warrior.I was aware that this symbol in some way was related to the so called Jews, so I wondered how come a Jewish warrior was present there. His clothes, armor and weapons did not differ that much from the opposing warrior who was a Croat. He did not look or at least strike me as a warrior typical from Middle East which I founded strange.My grandpa said that the warrior with the Star of David on his shield was a Tatar.At that time and age I had no idea of Tataria and Tatar’s.The term Tatar sounded to me awfully similar to the Swedish Tattare.
Which is a term in Swedish used for gypsies. So I thought for a long time that Tatars had some strange old connection to Jews and Gypsies..essentially being one and the same people before a separation occurred.


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## Mabzynn (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: MabzynnDate: 2020-02-06 13:07:12Reaction Score: 1




Ice Nine said:


> Thanks for the interest BS. I can only answer in the context of what we were handed down through time.
> 
> I got mixed up about the wounds and family members involved in the battle, it was what one Aunt had relayed to me.  But this is correct from 3 different sources. (other than my aunt)
> 3 Stanton's were killed, Captain Amos Stanton, Lieutenant Enoch Stanton and Sergeant Daniel Stanton ( 26 wounds) and 2 were wounded and paroled, Daniel Stanton Jr. and Edward, Edward received a terrible wound that exposed his heart, but he survived.
> ...


What a small world we find ourselves in.

The side of my family that took in my great grandmother who was an orphan native was the Avery family.

Uriah was the first of the official Avery's.  During the revolutionary war period they were known as Every.  Four of my family members died at Fort Griswold and Uriah fought in the war of 1812 as well.

We should chat more _@Ice Nine_ it would appear on the surface that you are an Acadian.


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## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: Red BirdDate: 2020-02-08 20:01:12Reaction Score: 3


My husband finally asked his mother about her mother‘s past. This grandma was born in 1906 (d. 2002) we are not sure where exactly, However she spent most of her life in the Fargo/Moorehead area. She was the only one of her family born in the USA, the rest came from Germany.
The documentary of the Orphan trains shows this area was highly involved With the program.

The family story he had heard was this grandma was ‘sold into slavery’ which I think most believed meant the family made her work to help support, etc.
Besides just asking what she knew about it, I asked him to ask his mom things like, was she quite a bit younger than the rest?  Did she look like them a lot?

Well, his mom totally shut the conversation down. Deflecting, then saying she didn’t want to talk about it and changed the subject. Of course he stopped.

it could be these generations just do not gossip, especially about family. Not a bad thing at all, but it IS history..


I’ve decided to add a little more about the life of grandma, above. it looks like her childhood was pretty rough, she lived through 2 world wars and a depression on up into a new millennium. Along with this she was a nurse AND a school teacher, they lost their dairy farm in the depression after her husband had a bad tractor accident (with problems ever after) raised a family that’s still going.
They were not perfect by any means but it should put perspective into our lives And ‘current events’.


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## Volgadeutsch (Jul 20, 2021)

Sylvanus777 said:


> Oh one more interesting anecdote from my paternal family side:
> 
> During WW2 the Austrian countryside took in many ethnic German refugees from the east. During that time, my paternal grandparents took in a couple of so called "Volga Germans" that had come from the Volga region fleeing persecution by Stalin. Friedrich Weimer (name must derive from the city of Weimar in Germany I would think) and his Russian wife Anastasia. They lived with my father's family until the 1960 and stayed in close contact to us even after moving to a nearby city, always being like the closes of family to us until they died around the early 2000s. Both were the most kind and caring people you could wish for, although they had their whole families brutally murdered with all property seized back in Russia. The man's only son ended up in Kasachstan, curiously. He visited 12-15 years or so ago, never heard of the guy again. Curious how people got shuffled around within the Soviet Union, the son of the displaced "Volga German" ending up in Kasachstan...
> 
> ...


I live in Lincoln Nebraska home of the Germans from Russia Museum.


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## Silencedogood (Dec 9, 2021)

My great grandmother was born in Venice, her brother, my uncle Angelo was the first from my Italian side to be born in the US.  My Great grandparents from the other side came over through Ellis Island from Munich in the early 1900's.  Oddly they both play in to SH theories about the third Reich and the Axis.  My great grandma died in 2005 but I did get to have some lengthy conversations about her early years and what she remembered about Italy.

The main thing that sticks with me today is that she had, above her door, Jesus on the cross and next to him was a picture of Il Duce.  She spoke surprisingly highly of him in spite of what we are told of all the evils of fascism in today's histories.  She mentioned how he rebuilt the country, encouraged love for Italy, helped protect the country, and of course, the trains ran on time.  She corresponded often with her cousins who still lived back in Italy and their views likely influenced her own as she grew up in the US from around age six.  Even though most of her life was post-WWII she held that the Italians were in the right and were fighting what she constantly called "a great evil."

I didn't think to press her at the time for what she meant by this but she never outwardly held that the evil was concerning Jews.  With this in mind, I'm sure the propaganda was heavy, and I'm sure she believed whatever it was that she was told.  However, the fact that Italians loved Italy and Il Duce far after the war does tell us something about the cause.

My German side came to America shortly after WWI and again, we have a certain fondness they had for their homeland.  The few conversations we've had lend me to believe that they believe that overall Hitler got a lot of things right and were unaware of any holocaust occurring, which I'm sure was kept on the downlow.  I do not recall speaking with my great grandparents on this side, but both normal grandparents are still  alive.  I'll need to speak with them about this subject, they do still speak fluent German and it comes out primarily when they're mad or complaining.  I did question them about the house they have lived in for the past fifty years.  The house has a large spire and is essentially a brick castle.  The story goes that a guy from the Carolinas had a bunch of 'extra' cherry wood from the south that he brought to the area and the house was used to build that.  An outrageous story really  considering it was built in the early 1900s(like everything in America) but they believe it.


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