Great/Grandparents and What We Learn From Them

SH.org OP Username
AgentOrange5
SH.org OP Date
2018-11-21 11:24:49
SH.org Reaction Score
55
SH.org Reply Count
55
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Username: Bettie29
Date: 2019-03-30 10:14:18
Reaction 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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Username: whitewave
Date: 2019-03-30 12:30:22
Reaction 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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Username: makzpj
Date: 2019-07-16 00:05:09
Reaction 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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Username: irishbalt
Date: 2019-07-16 06:32:37
Reaction Score: 7
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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Username: codis
Date: 2019-07-16 08:32:24
Reaction 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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Username: LostFrisco
Date: 2019-12-13 08:38:30
Reaction Score: 0
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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Username: Pazzarus
Date: 2020-02-03 19:03:40
Reaction 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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Username: codis
Date: 2020-02-04 07:10:46
Reaction Score: 1
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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Username: KorbenDallas
Date: 2020-02-04 07:24:30
Reaction 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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Username: Cl4ssyMF
Date: 2020-02-04 22:09:11
Reaction Score: 0
Dutch loved the slave trade so there is that.
 
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Username: codis
Date: 2020-02-05 08:47:20
Reaction Score: 3
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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Username: Son of a Bor
Date: 2020-02-05 17:16:25
Reaction 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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Username: Clown Of God
Date: 2020-02-05 21:35:55
Reaction 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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Username: Mabzynn
Date: 2020-02-06 13:07:12
Reaction Score: 1
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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Username: Red Bird
Date: 2020-02-08 20:01:12
Reaction 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’.
 
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.
I live in Lincoln Nebraska home of the Germans from Russia Museum.
 
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.
 
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.
That's probably the worst part about growing up, seeing your loved ones deteriorate and being unable to do anything
 
My four grandparents (and one step-gtandparent) were all born in the United States between 1915 and 1920.

My maternal grandmother was the child of Scottish immigrants. Her perspective on history was restricted to her own (difficult) life in small-town America. When I try to imagine how incredibly limited her sources of information as well as her opportunities for travel were, I begin to realize how easy it must have been back then to tell people absolutely anything. Her parents, arriving from the old world around 1900, would have believed without question whatever story they were told about the history of the United States. If they noticed some obvious anomaly like a half-buried building, they probably wouldn't think twice about it. They were too poor to care. In the off chance that they did pursue some kind of investigation, they would hit a dead-end immediately. In any case, that generation got a very strong anti-past brainwash. All of my grandparents exhibited this deep refusal and even hatred of old objects and ideas. This generation witnessed their beautiful cities being raped with interstate highways and brutalist architecture and applauded it.

My Boomer parents got the same brainwash, but a little less virulently.

My maternal grandfather's story is of possible interest here. He died when I was six. His father was a Croatian immigrant and his mother was half "Cherokee" and half white. I put that in quotation marks because I'm not sure the Cherokee were Indians as we generally imagine them. Both of his parents died or disappeared when he was a baby, so he was raised by his Croatian grandparents. Well, that's the story, but who knows? He was an orphan in any case. He lived in a small coal town in Pennsylvania (probably a mud-flooded town, they're everywhere in that region) and became a coal miner as a teenager. I think he made it to eighth grade. He became a degenerate alcoholic. He was not a good person. I guess his life was unimaginably hard. Again, he could have been told absolutely anything, and he probably would have believed it.

My father's parents came from a higher social class. My grandfather was born in the USA of Italian immigrants. His father, my great-grandfather, died at 96, so I remember him. He was a sculptor and plaster artisan who emigrated from Italy to the US in 1903 to work on the St. Louis international exhibition. He specialized in decorative molding and became wealthy in the 1910's and 1920's doing it. I used to think this was proof that the World's Fairs were indeed temporary staff buildings as claimed, but of course they may have just brought over foreign artisans like my great-grandfather to slap on a new façade. I can easily imagine him arriving there, not speaking English, noticing the buildings were older than claimed, and not really caring. He probably knew nothing about American history.

Italian worker, in Italian, to the Italian-American foreman: "These buildings look old."

Foreman (himself probably vetted by masons): "Who knows. Get back to work." Or: "They changed the plans. Get back to work." Or: "We're not paying you to ask questions. Get back to work."

Maybe this why they were all destroyed by "accidental" fires rather than disassembled as planned: so the many people who saw the truth firsthand would just shrug their shoulders and forget. Who cared about old buildings, anyway? My great-grandfather came to America to get rich. He probably associated old buildings with being poor in Italy. He probably would have been happy to participate in the demolition if they paid him enough. All he really cared about was money. His son, my grandfather, was an astonishingly gifted sculptor and illustrator, and the old man forced him to abandon it and become an architect, because it was seen as more prestigious. They didn't even teach him to speak Italian because it was associated with the hated past. They were Americans now. My grandfather did his duty and learned to design buildings in the modernist style. He was completely disconnected from the bigger picture. A man's job was to work, get paid, and have children. If the boss says tear the old building down and replace it with a brutalist box...you do it. I used to occasionally ask my grandfather about the past, but all I ever really got were trivial "color" anecdotes about buying a Coke for two cents, or swimming in the (later filled-in) canal to grab bananas that had fallen off the boat, or whatever.

Men and women of this generation were very strongly inculturated to associate any kind of curiosity or spontaneous speech with weakness. You just didn't ask questions, and you kept your eyes down. At least in the USA.

My paternal grandmother lived to be almost one hundred. She received a college education, was an avid reader with good taste, and had an incredible memory. Of my four grandparents, she would have been the most likely to notice something and pass it on. Her family had also been in the United States longer. I spent a lot of time with her. But still, she was a woman of her generation who deeply believed that "progress" was a categorical moral good and that her duty was to trust the people making decisions. For example, I asked her once if people had been upset when the extensive trolley system in her hometown was bought by car manufacturers, destroyed, and replaced by inferior buses. She said something like, "Well, that was progress." I could see in that moment that, intelligent as she was, it was beyond her to question things like this. Even though she had personally witnessed her home city, like so many others in the United States, basically demolished and ruined due to "progress", "modernization", etc., she could not really question the process on any meaningful level. My father, a Baby Boomer, is the same way. It became clear to me when I showed him the work of "Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth". He refused to look at it and asked me never to bring it up again. He was programmed not to ask questions and not to notice things he wasn't supposed to. A telling vignette: despite being a "soft corona skeptic", he got "vaccinated" because it was his duty. Shortly afterwards, I asked him if I could test the "conspiracy theory" that magnets stuck to the injection site. He said sure. I took a small neodynium magnet, moved it over his deltoid muscle, and...it stuck right to the jab site. It wasn't some subtle thing. It grabbed right to that spot and only that spot. For a second he just stared at it, his mind completely short-circuited. "Why is the magnet sticking?" he blurted out, with real shock in his voice. We repeated the experiment enough times to prove the "vaccine" had really magnetized his arm. He was scared, I could see it.

But fifteen minutes later he was making dumb jokes about how he was some kind of Marvel superhero mutant now. The tiny window of awareness that had opened when he saw the magnet stick to his arm had slammed shut.

He went on to get boosted.

That tells you everything you need to know about how the history forgers continue to get away with it.

As a bonus I will include my maternal step-grandfather, whom I only knew for a few years, after he married my grandmother and before he died. He was a WW2 veteran and wore one of those mesh-back hats everywhere. On one of our first meetings, he told me the following "life lesson" story:

"When I was ten years old we moved to a new town. On the first day of school, I asked who the toughest boy was and I challenged him to a fight. I licked him, and after that, I was the toughest boy."

End of lesson.

You get the picture.

My grandparents' grandparents were probably born around the time of the Civil War, so even they would have been raised post-Reset, if we assume the Civil War was the last big Reset in the USA. Of the sixteen of them, maybe only two were born in the United States. So it's not surprising that even my grandparents would have no clue.

At the risk of sounding arrogant, I believe that not one of the family members described here was psychologically capable of questioning anything presented to them by authority, no matter how much it might contradict what they saw with their own eyes. Sadly, after Covid, this no longer surprises me.
 
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