Interesting stories from previous generations?

[Laura Corin]

My mum talks about being in the Baedeker air raid on Exeter in 1942, when she was 17 and at boarding school. The girls from another boarding house had to evacuate their shelter in the middle of the raid and come to join Mum's shelter.

An 8 foot long unexploded bomb has been found less than two miles from her old school.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exeter_Blitz

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-56212295

 

[Rosie_0801]

My Nan and her girlfriends used to tell three different boys they could escort them home, then nick off out the back and catch the tram. 

She didn't meet her husband to be at any of those dances, but on the train. She wouldn't give him her number because he was drunk, but her friend handed it over and he went home and told his mother he'd met the girl he was going to marry. Great-Grandmother was not happy about this at all, but Grandad evidently wasn't too fussed about his mum's opinion.

[Laura Corin]

22 minutes ago, Rosie_0801 said:

My Nan and her girlfriends used to tell three different boys they could escort them home, then nick off out the back and catch the tram. 

She didn't meet her husband to be at any of those dances, but on the train. She wouldn't give him her number because he was drunk, but her friend handed it over and he went home and told his mother he'd met the girl he was going to marry. Great-Grandmother was not happy about this at all, but Grandad evidently wasn't too fussed about his mum's opinion.

Lovely story. I like the sound of your Nan and her friends. 

[Hannah]

My mother was born in 1943 in Rotterdam.  She had just turned a year old during the hunger winter of 1944-45.  My grandfather used to tell us how he road for km's on his rope-tyre bicycle to find 'brown beans', the only food he could consistently source for her to eat.  She disliked anything with beans in it as an adult!  

[J-rap]

Fascinating stories!  

Mine aren't as dramatic!  My mother remembers going to Memorial Day parades as a girl and seeing Civil War veterans marching in it.

My father used to have an "icebox" (not an electric refrigerator) growing up and remembers the iceman riding down the street in his horse and cart, delivering big blocks of ice to homes. (That's why when I was growing up, our refrigerator was called the icebox!)

When my dh and I lived in DC (a long time ago...), we were neighbors/friends with an elderly man who had been childhood friends with the son of the czar of Russia!  He fled Russia during the Revolution.

 

Edited February 28, 2021 by J-rap

[TheReader]

The big family lore story on one side is that an uncle (great-uncle) was held up by members of Jesse James' gang. The story goes that the uncle had his feet on a box, looking like just a step/bit of the wagon, and so as the gang went through their things and found nothing of value, they were  let go unharmed and not robbed. The money was in the step/box under the relative's feet. 

The other lore is that my grandparents were step brother & sister............the uncreepy part is that they were married first, then their widowed parents married each other later. But they loved teasing us grandkids with this info for a while before explaining the uncreepy part. 

Then there's the stuff like the time my grandparents visited the Colosseum in Rome and my grandpa went into an off-limits area for pictures....he had my grandma bring a giant purse/bag, and he wore a hat and coat while taking the pictures. Came out once caught and stuffed the coat/hat into the bag and off they oh-so-casually strolled....

[Condessa]

When I was 13, my grandma took me to the church historical sites in Palmyra, New York, where I saw a very old man who looked lonely sitting on a bench.  I struck up a conversation with him, and he told me about his whole life.  He talked about growing up in that area, his family the only members of our denomination, and the one-room schoolhouse that his parents had to fight for their kids to attend.  The schoolteacher tried to refuse them entry, and after she was told she couldn’t do that because their parents paid taxes for the school, she made them sit in the back of the room, facing the back wall, silently.  They could be in the room and listen, but she otherwise ignored them, and that was how he and his brother attended elementary school.

He has a very interesting life otherwise, and he pulled out his wallet and showed me pictures, and told me about his lovely wife of many years who had died five years before I met him, and his son who flew for the Air Force.  He was a remarkable man.

[fairfarmhand]

My granddad had like 9 siblings and grew up In the Great Depression. His mother would make biscuits for breakfast and wrap them up for their lunch pail at school. That’s all they had to eat He hated biscuits as an adult and couldn’t understand why anyone would eat them. He preferred toast. 
 

 

[fairfarmhand]

Also, my Grandmother Lucile was a nurse and when she was in training she was seduced by a doctor. She became pregnant and had a baby boy. She completed her training and began work at a tuberculosis hospital. She became ill with TB and had to become a patient in the very hospital in which she worked. During her very long stay there, her mother and father took over parenting the child. When Grandmother Lucile left the hospital, her mother (who I've heard was a terrible, manipulative, angry woman) made my Grandmother give the baby to her, and never speak of this scandal again. 

The child was raised thinking that his parents were the ones who raised him, but they actually were his grandparents, and his sister (my grandmother Lucile) was actually his birth mother. He never found out until he was 21, and he was very upset to learn this. 

My Grandmother Lucile didn't marry until she was in her 40s, when she met my Grandfather. She then had my mother, who was a "change of life baby". 🙂 My mother was an only child (or we all thought that). My mother didn't learn that she had a half brother until she was in adulthood, married with kids! 

I've always wondered at the shame she must have felt and the worry that her secret would get out. Because back then respectable single ladies (in the South anyway) didn't have babies unmarried. My aunt (married to the secret son) would tell this story and use the phrase, "Back then, that just wasn't done."

this is a photo of my grandmother when she was working in the tuberculosis hospital. 

Edited February 28, 2021 by fairfarmhand

[busymama7]

51 minutes ago, Condessa said:

When I was 13, my grandma took me to the church historical sites in Palmyra, New York, where I saw a very old man who looked lonely sitting on a bench.  I struck up a conversation with him, and he told me about his whole life.  He talked about growing up in that area, his family the only members of our denomination, and the one-room schoolhouse that his parents had to fight for their kids to attend.  The schoolteacher tried to refuse them entry, and after she was told she couldn’t do that because their parents paid taxes for the school, she made them sit in the back of the room, facing the back wall, silently.  They could be in the room and listen, but she otherwise ignored them, and that was how he and his brother attended elementary school.

He has a very interesting life otherwise, and he pulled out his wallet and showed me pictures, and told me about his lovely wife of many years who had died five years before I met him, and his son who flew for the Air Force.  He was a remarkable man.

Have you seen the Fighting Preacher? So good and sounds similar to this man's story. 

[MercyA]

My grandpa was childhood friends with Bob Fosse. He remembered being at a swimming pool with him, and Bob saying what he'd really like to do is have a career in music. (Bob Fosse directed and choreographed the musical Chicago.) 

My grandpa's family was very large, and the last brother home at night had to sleep in the closet (which was large enough for a bed but little else). 🙂 

Their family was so large that Grandpa was accidentally left in his crib at the lake house when he was a baby. When the family realized no one had him and drove back, they thankfully found him still asleep.

My grandpa's family was also Mormon. His sister was shopping in Marshall Fields once when she heard some women speculating about whether she had horns. (This sadly was a common myth about Mormons.) She took off her hat, showed them the top of her head, and said, "See! No horns!" 

My great-grandpa played poker with the Mafia in Chicago. 😬

My mom was the only white girl at an otherwise all-black dance in the 60's. (A male friend from her church asked her to attend.) Go mom.

Edited February 27, 2021 by MercyA

[HS Mom in NC]

My maternal grandmother was born in 1922 in Kentucky.  She told this story of her grandfather (who must've been born right after the end of the American Civil War) who was a deacon in his very rural church. (All white people.)  Word got back to church leadership that a member had been beating his wife and children.  All the deacons got together and asked him if it was true.  He sort of bragged about it with an I'm the head of the household kind of defense, so they horsewhipped him warning him that if they ever even suspected he was harming his wife, kids, or anyone else, they'd be back and wouldn't go so easy on him next time. Now that's some church discipline.  She said there wasn't really any law enforcement in the area and even if there was, she didn't think at that time they would've done anything about domestic abuse.

Edited February 27, 2021 by Homeschool Mom in AZ

[Spryte]

We have an oral tradition in our family that doesn’t quite match up with historians.  Approximately 9 - 11 yr old ancestor set out for America with a few siblings and a parent. Parent died on journey, and upon arrival the ship’s captain arranged indentured servitude.  Ancestor ran away, and was crying beside a road, when a woman in a carriage insisted on helping him.  She ended up sending him to school, and paying for his education.  This is the loose story I learned as a child, from grandparents.  It differs somewhat from reality, as oral traditions often do, but his journey and sponsored education were right on.  

 

 

[Lady Florida.]

My grandfather's parents were among the few Italians to come to this country in the late 19th century with some money. Not a lot but enough not to have to live in the tenements. My grandmother's family were among the poorest of Italian immigrants. When she was 5 her mother died in childbirth and my grandmother and her two brothers were sent to a Catholic orphanage. Men simply didn't raise children alone and there was no other family here to help. When she was 14 her father remarried and the kids, now teens, went home. Because she was raised by nuns of a certain era she never learned to cook well. I must have had the only Italian grandmother on the planet who was a terrible cook lol. Anyway, we always thought my grandfather's family didn't like her because of her poor background. A few years ago my cousin, her adult daughter, and I were going through some family papers. We found their marriage license. It was dated barely 6 months before my mother was born! I wonder if my mother ever knew. It explains why his family didn't like her and always called her a puttana. As if their precious boy had nothing to do with it. 

Edited February 27, 2021 by Lady Florida.

[Sneezyone]

My uncle was quite the ladies man. He sang in juke joints/clubs in WA and CA. When the Ike and Tina review came to town, Ike was so impressed by my uncle, he asked my grandmother to let him go on a chitlin circuit tour with them. My grandma said no. Family lore has it that she was concerned about his dating habits and didn’t think he would come home alive. Surely God and everyone within a 5 state radius knew that was true. I used to drive home from work and stop at his house to visit with my aunt. One day, he brought out this box with old ration coupons, playbills, signed copies of Ike and Tina’s promo photos (which he let me have) and about 20 wallet size photos of his old “squeezes”. My auntie and I just sat there shaking our heads.

Edited February 27, 2021 by Sneezyone

[Sneezyone]

My grandfather lied about his age to enlist in the Army in 1939. He was 16 and units were still segregated but he was intelligent and streetwise. His misspent ‘youth’ allowed him to send all but $1 of his pay home to his (single) mom and siblings. He hustled people at cards and billiards on paydays to support his mom/siblings and his growing family too. When units were desegregated, he eventually spot promoted to an acting officer role. My grandparents were even featured in the Seattle Times when they returned from a tour in Japan. My grandma loved to tell how they were entertaining bridge friends one evening when she started telling the other couple about his antics. As she talked, he dealt the cards and when she picked up her hand she held all four aces.

Edited February 27, 2021 by Sneezyone

[Farrar]

My grandfather told me some great WWII stories. The night before he was supposed to ship out to Europe, he and some buddies left base to go get drunk and find loose women. They had no idea what they were doing and accidentally crossed the state line from Maryland to DC where they all ended up nearly hauled in for some sort of curfew and soldiers violation so they never got to get drunk or find loose women. The next morning they turned up to ship out but it was VE Day, so they were like, never mind. They put them on a train instead and they shipped out into the Pacific where he basically just hung out on the ship the entire time and watched air battles overhead.

[Lady Florida.]

After one of dh's grandmothers died dh, his siblings, and all of us spouses went to Tennessee to clean out her house. We found her diary and took turns reading from it. One entry got all of us choked up. 

It was dated Nov. 11, 1918. She was 13 years old then. She wrote that around 2 am they were awakened by the sound of fire whistles, horns, and "all kind of thing that make noise". A neighbor was banging on their door and when they opened it he told them that Germany signed the Armistice. Later in the morning she, her sister, and some neighbor kids went to school but when they got there school was closed because everyone was in town celebrating. They went to town where there was confetti being tossed everywhere and people were running up and hugging everyone they met. All the stores were closed so the owners could celebrate with everyone else. (She goes on in typical early teen fashion to talk about some boys they saw, apparently one of whom was a crush of hers.) Later they watched a parade with all "the best people of town riding in it". She writes that she went to bed a 9 pm with no supper because she was too excited to eat. She fell into bed tired but so happy because the war was over and "my Ira" (older and apparently adored brother) would finally be coming home.

Edited February 27, 2021 by Lady Florida.

[Eos]

One of ours goes like this: my Grandfather was doing research for his PhD on the transition of European map-making from medieval edge-of-the-world-there-be-dragons style to Enlightenment this-puppy-is-actually-round type maps.  He needed some info that was at either a) the Vatican or b) an abbey in Austria (the family takes sides on this part.)  He went to meet the monk who had the necessary knowledge, but the monk was gone for the week.  Frustrated, Grandfather stopped on his way out to use the restroom.  The monks at that time would cut up ancient manuscripts to use as toilet paper, and there in stacks of Latin-inscribed rectangles, was the exact manuscript that he needed.  He scooped up all the "tp" and headed home to finish his thesis.  In his bibliography are photographs of these manuscript strips along with all the other citations.

 

[Gobblygook]

My grandpa always told the story that his grandpa used to chop wood with Abraham Lincoln. I have no idea if it’s true, and obviously no way of verifying it, but in tracing my family history, my great-great-grandpa did live in the same area as Abraham Lincoln and around the same time. 

[Kareni]

9 hours ago, Hannah said:

My mother was born in 1943 in Rotterdam.  She had just turned a year old during the hunger winter of 1944-45.  My grandfather used to tell us how he road for km's on his rope-tyre bicycle to find 'brown beans', the only food he could consistently source for her to eat.  She disliked anything with beans in it as an adult!  

My mother was some years older than yours and born in Leiden. She told of eating tulip bulbs during WW2 and said she'd never eaten anything so bitter.

Regards,

Kareni

[Tanaqui]

My mother's grandmother was picked up with a group of other people by the occupying Nazi forces, and they divided the men into two groups - Flanders, go home, Wallonia, come with us. Well, his town, Wavre, is riiiiiiiiiight on the border so he sidled into the other group, pretended he spoke more Flemish than "Where's the bathroom", and made his way home that way.

Going back a generation or two, one of my mother's mother's male ancestors was one day out walking to work when another man comes up to him and says "Hi, you don't know me, but I'm your brother". Turns out that their shared biological father had gotten himself into a bit of a situation with two different girls, but luckily for him one of the two was already seeing somebody else who loved her, loved the baby, didn't care that it wasn't "his". So he married the other one. I don't think it was much of a secret, it's just that nobody had told Pa Joe until then. (I say Pa Joe, he wasn't Pa Joe yet, I guess he was just Joseph.)

[katilac]

My dad was one of 9 siblings who grew up in Acadiana (French Louisiana, populated by the exiles who were kicked out of Canada circa the French and Indian War). They only spoke Cajun French at home and didn't know English until they went to school, very typical of the time and place. They would be severely punished at school if they were caught speaking Cajun French, even though they didn't yet know English. The banning of it in schools was actually encoded in the state constitution! In addition to the fact that they 'should' be speaking English in school, Cajun French was considered very low class, very backwards. Although all of them remained fluent through adulthood and spoke it frequently amongst themselves, not a one of them passed on the language to their kids. 

This would have been roughly the 1940s and 1950s when they were experiencing these strong efforts to wipe out their native language. Then, starting in the 1970s, they observed a lot of money and effort being expended to revive it 🙄

Unfortunately, most of the people who naturally and fluently speak Cajun French are in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. All the classes in the world can't make up for naturally learning a language. 

 

[katilac]

9 hours ago, MercyA said:

 My great-grandpa played poker with the Mafia in Chicago. 😬

 

My dad once accidentally got into a bourré game that was far more serious and high stakes than he thought (bourré is a trick-taking game that Cajuns play instead of poker, lol). You don't bet back and forth like in poker, but you can still owe a whole lot of money if you don't take any tricks on a certain hand. Money that he definitely didn't have. It wasn't the mafia, but it also wasn't people who would just let you back out of the game once you sat at the table, so he just "played and prayed" lol. He said it was the longest night of his life 😂

 

[Lori D.]

My first job was working in the kitchen of an Italian restaurant. The cook was a feisty short German woman, barely 5-foot tall, who shared stories while we were working of her life as a teenager in Germany during WW2. The one that I remember was very frightening -- she was on a train heading from one town to another, and the train was stopped because both cities on either end were being bombed by the allies.

She ended up marrying an American GI stationed there right at the end of the war, and immigrated here, where they lived on her husband's farm. She said that for years and years after the war, like when her kids were 10yo and ran through the house and banged the screen door she would jump out of the reaction from living through the bombings back in the war.

Edited February 28, 2021 by Lori D.

[Moonhawk]

My grandmother was born in the early 1920s in Tombstone, Arizona. When she was 4-5, her father died, leaving her mother and 4 children. They were so poor, they had no shoes and dirt floors. (She would always pause here to remind you, though, it was a very clean dirt floor and her mother kept a very clean house).

One day a lady at the church noticed my Nana and her sister (around 3 years old) had no shoes. "Where are your shoes?" "We don't have any, we've never had any." And they were promptly given fitting shoes and shoes for the other children at home.

Exact quote: "We were so proud of our new shoes! We ran home to show everyone. Mother was so embarrassed, and so humiliated at how people must think we were so poor, that she found a man in another town, married him, and we moved away before the end of the month."

(Obviously a child's viewpoint of cause and effect, but it was one of her favorite stories. As a side note, her family grew to include 16 children including herself. She was the second oldest child, and the oldest girl. She died in 2018, out-surviving all of her siblings except my Tia Mavi, who was the 3yo in the story.)

[Lady Florida.]

12 hours ago, MercyA said:

 

My great-grandpa played poker with the Mafia in Chicago. 😬

 

😲

Your post reminded me that my mother served Meyer Lansky once when he and some of his, uh, "friends" walked into the restaurant where she worked as a server when we still lived in NJ. They joked and flirted with her and left her a really good tip. What Lansky and his cronies didn't know is she was dating a cop at the time (my future stepfather).

Edited February 28, 2021 by Lady Florida.

[Carrie12345]

My grandparents (some of them) and great-grandmother shared a few of their mostly normal childhood/young adult stories, but none of them really went into the hard and scary times. I do respect that they didn’t want to “go there”, but I wish I knew more.

I can say that my grandmother lied about her age to be a professional dancer. My great-grandmother (other side) said she played in piano bars, but I wonder if there’s more to the story considering the dates of prohibition.  And my grandfather apparently tried to bring an orphan home with him from the Korean War (via Germany), but it didn’t happen in the end.

Dh and I were both brought up being told about our Native American ancestry. For me, it was a vague “Iroquois, way back” thing but, for Dh, it was a recent, “We’re very NA” thing, to the point of having lots of Native decor in the house.  Dd and I did our DNA, and mine confirmed my itty bitty sliver. Hers confirmed that her tiny fraction came from me. Zero from her father!

Some digging placed mine with the first Native-Frenchman recorded marriage in Canada, my 9th great-grandparents. The story of her upbringing is open to some uneasy interpretation. She was actually said to be Algonquin, not Iroquois.

[Annie G]

My grandfather reluctantly served in the German army during WW1, but after the war desperately wanted to come to the US.  He ended up stealing a passport (he said the guy was passed out drunk at the dock and he just took it) and assumed the man’s identity as a crew member on a ship. After three trips to the US, in 1921 he finally attempted to enter to stay. The ship’s documents list him as a stowaway (there were three on that ship!) and it has his real name written above his assumed name on the printed paperwork. The other two stowaways were sent back but my grandfather was allowed to stay.  He never took back his old name, and even named his only son after the guy. So my uncle was a junior to a guy they never knew. 
My uncle  was able to pull some strings and get his grandmother (the above mentioned guy’s mom) out of East Berlin and brought to the US in the early 1960’s.  Oma never learned English and my sisters and I didn’t know much German, but love is love. 
Yeah, it irritates me when family members whine about all the ‘illegal immigrants’ coming here!

[brehon]

My great-grandmother & great-grandfather (father’s side) made bathtub gin in the 20s during Prohibition.

My dad’s side of the family, including the above g-grandparents, are mostly Italian with some German (Prussian - they were very proud of that fact). One of my great aunts married a mob boss and I’m told the Italian branch was fine with it and the Prussian branch was...not.

 

[Corraleno]

My great-aunt was born in 1898 and when she was 16 she fell in love with a 24 year old widower with 3 kids, whose wife had died in childbirth. Her parents were vehemently opposed because he was Native American, so they married in secret — but her parents still refused to let her move in with him, even though they were married, insisting that her primary responsibility as the eldest daughter was taking care of her own siblings. So she would get up before dawn, walk several miles to her husband’s house to cook breakfast and take care of those kids, then walk home to do the cooking and cleaning and childcare for her family, then back to his house to make dinner and put the kids to bed, etc. After a year of that she was finally allowed to move in with him.

She had 8 pregnancies but lost all of them, most likely because she was Rh negative. 😢 But she raised her 3 stepchildren as well as her sister’s 3 children (including my mother) after her sister died — and she did it in a tiny 2 bedroom house with a coal stove in the kitchen that was the only source of heat. I assume they must have added a bathroom at some point, but I know for sure they only had an outhouse until my mother was in her early teens, when she moved in with family friends.

[Corraleno]

My great-grandmother was born and raised in the slums of Derry, Northern Ireland. When she was 8 months pregnant, she and her husband booked tickets on a ship to New York, but the ship was delayed and she gave birth to my grandfather before it left. So she gave him a little whiskey to keep him quiet and smuggled him on the boat. When they landed in NY she said he had been born in US waters just before they docked, so they listed his birthplace as NYC and counted him as a US citizen. She was a quite a character, she swore like a sailor and did not take crap from anyone. Once during WW2 she was on a ferry when a drunk started ranting and yelled “God bless Hitler!” She beat the shit out of him while swearing a blue streak, hitting him so many times with a bag of plums that it looked like he was bleeding plum juice.

Once, when we were visiting her, my parents and several other relatives went out for the evening leaving us with g-gma, who had a few whiskeys and promptly passed out. After a few hours, my baby brother started crying and I didn’t know what to feed him, so little 5 yr old me took my 3 yr old sister and baby brother, all in our pajamas, to the bar next door and asked if they knew where my mother was. Apparently they thought that was hilarious and proceeded to give us sodas and snacks and kept us entertained until my parents came back.

[idnib]

My dad will talk sometimes about the 1944 Bombay (Mumbai) port explosion and the absolute panic nearby people felt, thinking that they might be in a Pearl Harbor type of situation. All the parents and kids were running around trying to find each other and hunker down.

Edited February 28, 2021 by idnib

[elegantlion]

My mom grew up in the country in a family of 8 children. She attended a one room schoolhouse from grades 1-8. Since there was only one teacher, one year she skipped a grade because my mom was the only student in her grade and the teacher pushed her up a grade to make it easier. Another year her teacher was her older brother. She lived 12 miles outside of town and the bus stop for high school was literally about 4 miles away and she did not have access to a car. So she moved to town for high school and before she finished high school, she had her own apartment and worked at a grocery store to support herself. After graduation, she moved to the downtown area of a large city where she knew no one and worked as a telephone operator. 

 

 

[DoraBora]

My grandmother told me that she had to resign her schoolteaching job during the Depression because her husband had a teaching job, and no one would tolerate a married woman to work if her husband had a job.  She said that cash was so hard to come by, as so many banks had failed, that the town operated its businesses using scrip, a form of local currency.

She told the story of sitting at her kitchen table one day, feeding my dad, who was a baby.  She looked up to see a tramp standing at the kitchen screen-door.  This wasn't unheard of, and she said she was about to get up to give the man some food to take with him, but something made her look at him more closely.  It was her brother-in-law!  Her husband's brother, who had lost his job in Houston, had been riding the rails, looking for work.  He had ended up in their little West Texas town and went to look for his brother.  He ended up staying with their family for a year or so until he could figure out what to do next.  (I wish I had asked which brother!  I met them all at one time or another.)

 

Edited February 28, 2021 by DoraBora

[Farrar]

I'm enjoying all these!

Dh's grandmother was always fun to listen to stories from. She had grown up super poor in the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma. When she turned 18, she announced she was leaving. Her whole family was shocked, but she got on a bus and came to New England where she went to work in a factory and met dh's grandfather, who was much older (gasp), Italian (or, his parents were, anyway), and a socialist and an atheist (triple gasp). We're still sometimes retroactively shocked on behalf of her Oklahoma roots that she was so bold and daring as a young woman. She was very short, and incredibly strong willed. She ended up as the floor supervisor at the factory. 

[kbutton]

On 2/28/2021 at 2:00 PM, idnib said:

My dad will talk sometimes about the 1944 Bombay (Mumbai) port explosion and the absolute panic nearby people felt, thinking that they might be in a Pearl Harbor type of situation. All the parents and kids were running around trying to find each other and hunker down.

I had heard about Port Chicago and about the Halifax Disaster, but this one was new to me. How tragic!

23 hours ago, DoraBora said:

My grandmother told me that she had to resign her schoolteaching job during the Depression because her husband had a teaching job, and no one would tolerate a married woman to work if her husband had a job.  She said that cash was so hard to come by, as so many banks had failed, that the town operated its businesses using scrip, a form of local currency.

Interesting to know that it wasn't just a company store thing to issue scrip! I had an aunt that used to speak fondly of the company store (mining town), and I always wondered at that--my impression was that most companies jacked up prices while also paying in scrip. Maybe the fact that her experience with scrip was during the Depression somehow made it seem less problematic. She was a child too, so maybe she just remembered the store fondly and didn't really process it the same.

I also had a bootlegger (beer, not gin) in my family, but that was one of the least problematic things he did, lol! He supplied county commissioners, and when someone would turn him in, they'd come and tip over a few barrels for show. Family lore has at least two stowaways in the family tree--one was neglected by parents; the other one was a teenager fleeing the military draft of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Double cousins were a big thing among immigrants in that era and in my family tree. I get the impression people were kind of isolated in ethnic enclaves in rural mining towns with a limited courting pool but lots of kids in each family (dozen+ kids per family). 

An in-law served in the national guard with a future supreme court justice, though he didn't have any particular stories about him. 

My grandmother has some hilarious stories about admirers, including one that would serenade her on horseback. 

The church I attended growing up had an interesting history intertwined with my family. When the church was used by its first denomination, my dad's side of the family belonged to that church, and we had no idea until I noticed that information in some obituaries and other sources and did a little digging. That denomination faded out in the area, and a several generations back uncle on my mother's side of the family was instrumental in his denomination buying the building (or in starting the local congregation for the denomination that bought the building--not sure which way that went; Grandma had a pretty low opinion of that uncle, lol!). It eventually changed to a non-denominational church at some point while my grandmother was an adult, I think. Anyway, I had no idea growing up that I'd probably had ancestors in that church it's entire history, but not ones that necessarily knew each other or were people we knew about. 

One branch of the family has a long history of military service from colonial times to the Vietnam era. My grandfather's WWII unit (not sure the right term) was logistically influential in the Battle of the Bulge (combat engineers), but he has out the worst of it with damaged feet from the frozen trenches. He had some interesting stories, but generally stayed on the positive side with just hints at the darker parts. His Civil War ancestor was from a famous regiment, and his ancestor was left for dead on the field at Gettysburg but survived. He and at least several other officers in his regiment were photographed at Matthew Brady's studio (he went in as a private and earned battlefield promotions to become an officer). His last CW duty was to be stationed at a prison camp. We know nothing of this part of the history, just that it was pretty brief (less than a year, I think). When I have tried to dig up information on that camp, it initially sounded like it was no big deal and was a fairly humane place, but recent scholarship is showing it was likely otherwise, but there's not a lot of information. It wasn't previously a well-known camp. I have wondered if there was a direct relationship between that experience and the fact that while his local relatives were very active in post-war reunions, he is not usually in pictures or listed on the reunion rolls that I can see. Makes me wonder if he felt guilty about his role and/or traumatized by his experiences there that might have been beyond his control.

 

 

[Tanaqui]

"Scrip" just means a currency other than legal tender. People use scrip today, even! Points on your credit cards, gift cards, bus tokens, those tickets you get at Chuck E. Cheese by playing the games - these are all scrip. Local communities sometimes offer scrip as well, to be used alongside the national currency.

[Lori D.]

On 2/28/2021 at 3:14 PM, DoraBora said:

My grandmother told me that she had to resign her schoolteaching job during the Depression because her husband had a teaching job, and no one would tolerate a married woman to work if her husband had a job...

Yes, this was true in many areas during the Depression -- married women couldn't get jobs because it would take away the few jobs available that men needed for providing for families. In the early 1930s, my grandparents got married in secret and she continued to live at home so she could continue to teach. About a year and half after they got married, she became pregnant, so they had to announce their marriage and she had to quit working. Grandpa had a hard time finding steady work for those first years, so it was tough for those first years when they really needed Grandma's job but she wasn't allowed to work.

[egao_gakari]

We don't have many very cool family stories, but there's one that we found out about after my grandpa died. Grandpa was a priest in the Episcopal Church, and his father was too. In Grandpa's study, we found a typed-up testimony from great-grandpa. Shortly after great-grandpa arrived in the US from New Zealand (where his parents had moved from England), he heard of a young lady parishioner who was a concert pianist (debuted with the Boston Symphony) but was now dying of stomach cancer. Great-grandpa went to visit. Over the next few months, he would go to see her about weekly, pray with her, and put her under hypnosis. (I guess in 1908 this was cutting-edge healing practice?) Well, she was healed of the stomach cancer! And they got married, and eventually had my Grandpa.

They had one child, before Grandpa, who died of spina bifida around age 1. They named him Philips after the man who wrote O Little Town of Bethlehem, because supposedly great-grandma was related to him. Grandpa never knew Philips (the brother not the composer), but in his childhood he received Christmas gifts signed, "With Love from Philips." I find this a bit... macabre, but that was one of the ways the family had chosen to keep their lost child's memory alive. We still have a children's book (Heidi I think?) with "Merry Christmas to Frank, Love Philips" inscribed in the flyleaf.

[DawnM]

I have a lot of salty tales to tell from my mother's side of the family.    Her grandfather was a bootlegger during prohibition in South Carolina, he had a "secret" bar that everyone in town knew about, and killed 3 people that we know of, there may have been more.   He only went to jail for the death of one of them, and didn't stay in prison long.   He was known in town as Mean Joe, and you wouldn't want to cross him.

I didn't learn any of this until a cousin told me within the last 10 years.   Apparently my mother's side has many secrets they are ashamed to tell.  they are starting to come out.

[Terabith]

My father marched in the sanitation workers' strike with MLK right before he died.  He was teaching sociology at Memphis State at the time while going to grad school, and he came to the strike from work and carried his briefcase filled with heavy textbooks in the march.  While marching, he was chased by a police officer down an alley.  The cop moved to hit my father with a billy club, and my dad blocked the hit with the briefcase, swung his briefcase as hard as he could at the officer's crotch, and ran like the wind out of the alley, hurdling over a fence at the end, ran back to his car, and drove home.  

He still has the briefcase with the dent.

[Jaybee]

All the mentions of bootlegging remind me of something my dad told me once (he was born in the 1920s). When he was a boy, he and his cousin found a still in the woods. I asked what they did about it--did they tell the police or anything? He said that they ran away as fast as they could, and never mentioned it to a soul. It was a very dangerous thing to find a still; you could get killed for the discovery.