• stoly@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    My grandma was born in 1917. I think of that sometimes to remember just how far back my connections go.

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      My grandma was born in 1920. She died last year at 103.

      I know she couldn’t live forever, but she was the best person ever. Is it so wrong to want her to live to be 200 years old?

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 month ago

      Mine was born in 1906! She remembered London being bombed in WWI. How weird is it that I actually talked to someone who remembered that?

          • SidewaysHighways@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            That’s what I was thinking! Pretty crazy.

            I have something similar but from ww2

            The story I was told:

            My grandmother and two of her brothers decided to emigrate to Canada when their neighbor found an unexploded bomb in the chimney.

            The nightly bombings kinda scarred her for life

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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              1 month ago

              My dad was a kid in London in WWII. I’m only in my late 40s, but he was in his 40s when I was born, so it’s a long chain.

              And we have a related WW2 story. My grandfather was an air raid warden, meaning he was out in the streets when the bombs were dropping to get people to safety (I wish I had an ounce of that sort of bravery). He told me once he was inspecting a house and the floor gave way and he literally landed on top of an unexploded bomb!

              They also lost four houses in the bombings. My dad had all kinds of crazy stories like sleeping on the Underground platform during a raid and getting woken up by commuters stumbling over him on the way to work the next morning.

              So I guess we’re lucky our ancestors made it out of there alive.

          • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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            1 month ago

            I’ve always wanted to ride on a zeppelin. I hear they are working on hybrid blimps but we will have to wait and see.

            I think it would be really cool to be able to have dinner on a blimp. Right now I think the focus is on cargo.

      • stoly@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Mine told me that she was a child in her father’s Model T and that lightning struck and exploded a tree right behind them as they were driving. I always loved that story.

    • superkret
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      1 month ago

      My grandma once told me how she chopped a burglar’s hand off in 1918.
      She lived till 2010.

        • superkret
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          1 month ago

          He fled. My great grandfather came home an hour later, and found broken glass and a severed hand in his house.
          He didn’t find the intruder anywhere nearby, threw the hand in the nearest river, and cleaned up the house.

          Police never came, and you didn’t call them either, in Germany in 1918.