“That Was Gutsy”: 30 Old People Share What Life Was Like For Their Grandparents

Grandparents born 1860-1880 depending. Always talked about the Depression, both grandfather's fought in WWI. They came from big families-10 kids or more-raised on farms. Mothers side from Minnesota, fathers side from Missouri. Heard things like "working a team of horses for field work", shucking corn, one room schools with one teacher for all grades, sharing a bed with many other siblings, still born births were a topic, as was life before cars. Funny stories of dirt roads turning to mud when it rained.

I’m not an old person, but I have stories from my grandmother about her parents and grandparents.

Her father was born in 1901 in the Austro Hungarian empire. He was the 3 known child, youngest, and only boy. His family was dirt poor. Everyone was a serf who lived on land owned by a Duke. They would be up working from sunrise to sunset all day everyday. I think the way things worked was..you work for the Duke, you get paid very little or barely anything at all, but he allows you to live on his land. Kinda like slavery in a way. I guess back then they didn’t have any other options.

Sometime between 1905-1907 when he was a young boy, his father abandoned the family to go start a new family with a mistress. This action started what would end up being a 80 year grudge full of hatred and resentment towards his father.

But his grandfather stepped up. He was very close to his grandfather and loved him very much. His grandfather had worked himself up to a nice position with the Duke and was in charge of caring for all the horses the Duke owned. He wore a red uniform with gold buttons.

Shortly before WW1 broke out, the family had been making plans to get out of Europe and get to America for a better life. So how things worked was..the family would put together whatever money they had, send one family member to travel through Germany, buy a boat ticket, sail to America, get a job, and then somehow send the money back to Hungary. Then repeat the process one at a time until everyone was brought over. A lot of families were doing this as well.

Now..I was also told that some men when they would get to America, would decide to forget about their family back in Europe and start a new family and new life under a new name. This was always a risk but everyone was willing to take it.

Well, just about everyone had made it over but then WW1 broke out in 1914. Now it was just great grandfather and his grandfather left and it was great grandfather’s turn. Two days before he was supposed to leave, the Hungarian Army came on the land and seized all of the Duke’s horses and whatever else they could pillage from the Duke for the war effort. Then the next day, his grandfather suffered a stroke. Great grandfather was devastated and he didn’t want to leave his grandfather behind..but his grandfather ordered him and told him that he HAD to leave since they were not allowing boys over the age of I think 14 to leave and he was 13 at the time. The next morning his grandfather died but he had no time to grieve as he then had to then travel on horse and wagon through Germany with others to get to the boat.

His grandfather gave him his tobacco pipe to remember him shortly before he died. However on the ship ride to America, someone stole the pipe and it was never seen again.

His mother had taken up a boyfriend in America. However his mother was still legally married to the no show father who had left. But back in those days, having kids with different last names was super frowned upon in social stigma’s so his mother changed her last name to that of the boyfriend. His older sisters also changed the last name. However great grandpa refused because he was stubborn and said he wasn’t changing his name for no one. The boyfriend and his mother tried beating his resistance out of him for a long time but he stubbornly never gave in. This lead to resentment toward his mother and bitterness to his “step father”. Great grandpa was enrolled in school, but he couldn’t understand English so he quit and went to work in the factories hand rolling cigars.

Sometime in the early 1920’s his father reappeared and wrote him a letter asking to meet up and rekindle their relationship. Great grandfather decided to give him a chance despite his better judgement. They met up at some place and the meeting didn’t go so well. His father was dressed up in a suit, had apparently got into some money, and talked and paid more attention himself then great grandfather. Great grandfather blew a fuse, cursed his father out, told him in so many words that he was a disgrace and that he never wanted to see him again. They parted ways and his father was never seen or heard of ever again.

As for great grandmother, she was first generation born in America in 1911. The youngest of 5 children. Her father was born around 1858/1859, and was 17-18 years older than her mother who was born in 1876. They all came from Hungary. Her father died when she was 3 years old in 1914 so she didn’t have any memory of him. All that’s known was he “got sick and died” so..that could be anything.

I have 1 photo of him and it’s the oldest photo I have.

Anyway, great grandmother’s mother was very old school. In Hungary she gave birth to all of her children in the fields while working as a serf. After her husband died, she quickly found a man and remarried as she could not support herself and the children on her own.

The step father was not the greatest man. One day great grandmother’s mother was washing clothes outside and rolled up her sleeves. She left a pot of hot water on the stove. The step father saw her sleeves rolled up and came outside and threw the pot of hot water at her, accusing her of showing her off skin to other men.

The Step father died in 1919, another “got sick and died” moment so who knows there as well.

Back in the day, funerals were held in the family house and the open casket with the body in it would be there for a little bit. Great grandmother had terrible nightmares as she saw her dead step father’s body twitch and move a little (body compulsions after death) and it freaked her out.

During prohibition, great grandmother’s mother got heavily involved with moonshine. She had her sons built a still but she did all the work. The family made a lot of money during this time and her liquor was the best in town, even the politicians and police were buying some. However a local sherif in town was jealous that his stuff wasn’t getting customers so he tipped off the Fed’s about her moonshine and they got raided. Couple of great grandmother’s brothers went to jail, great grandmother’s mother wasn’t charged. I think the sons took the fall so their mother would not go to jail.

My paternal grandparents lived 15 miles away from us when I was a kid, so I’ll speak about them. They were born in 1888 and 1890, in southern India. They were children of Christian missionaries, who founded a school that is now quite well known. My grandparents’ parents were with the same mission (from the Congregational Church), so my grandparents knew each other well growing up.

My family has a long history of academic emphasis, so my grandparents were well educated. As young teenagers, they were sent to America to attend a boarding school in Oberlin Ohio that was a feeder school for Oberlin College, which apparently had ties to the Congregational Church. Both got degrees from Oberlin, grandpa got a PhD (not sure where?) and they got married and moved to Buffalo, NY, where Grandpa was a Dean at U of B.

Grandpa was not very tolerant of my Grandma’s intellectual curiosity and continually tried to thwart her interests in writing, art and music, preferring she focused on her “gender appropriate“ duties. Although they were raised as missionarys’ children, they could best be described as church going atheists, deeply involved in social issues, such as civil rights and womens’ suffrage.

Grandma continued to write, paint and play music, despite her husband’s disapprobations. My Grandpa played golf, was part of a “Philosophy group” that met regularly to discuss intellectual issues. Curiously, he was Ohio state tennis champion as a college student, but quit playing almost immediately upon graduating, fearing he’d never play at that high a level again.

They had lots of friends, through the college town community they retired to, and were heavily involved with a church that broke off from the mainstream Presbyterian church that refused to allow integration. So, their church was decidedly integrated in the 1950s and in the South, no less.

Grandma used to tell us stories about growing up in Southern India. The scariest stories involved tigers. A tiger is perhaps the only predator that will designate a human village as a food source, returning every week or so to pick off another meal. When a tiger would kill a person, the men would go out into the jungles with primitive weapons, at the anticipated timing of the next “feast” and try to kill it, before it killed another villager (or killed the hunters). One such night, my Grandmother, my great Grandmother and my great aunt were cowering inside while the men were out in the jungle trying to kill the tiger, when they heard heavy footsteps on the roof. It was The Tiger! The construction of their dwelling was fairly primitive, so (as the story goes), they could even hear it sniffing through the flimsy for its next meal. The threesome huddled together, not making a sound.

These stories captivated and terrified us. To this day, my fear of tiger attack is probably more pronounced than probabilities suggest.

I'm 60, my mom is 89 and healthy.

Her mom is the only grandparent I really got to know as my parents were both young children in large families.

Mom's dad died when she was in elementary school.

Dad's parents died before I hit my teens (of diabetes related things) and lived too far away for frequent contact.

The grandmother I knew was so tired and worn out from abject poverty as a widow in a rural fishing community with declining fish stocks. Rum running may have been one way the community tried to get income but my grandpa died of TB from the bad conditions in prison when he was the one caught guarding the rum stash.

Grandma was kind, and loved having her grandchildren around (with 11 kids who lived to adulthood, and my mom the youngest, my brother and I were the last small kids in her life. She bribed us to visit with cookies as we detoured by her home on the walk home from school with my friends (grades K -5) but then we moved to a new community so I only saw my grandma on Saturdays when my mom would bring her grocery shopping and have Saturday lunch and supper with us,

Lovely lady, lived through financial trauma, and had many of her kids (or their partners) die before she did. She was tough to make it through hard times, but worn out.

Losing kids to WW2 was hard on her.

What a great question! both parents born in the 20s. Looking back, I can see a lot of ways they were scarred by the Great Depression and WW2. It showed more in things they didn't say than in things they did say.

Grandparents on one side were part of the WW1 generation, grandparents on the other side were born during Reconstruction. I often wonder how the effects of those events might have affected their descendants.

My paternal grandmother was born in 1901, and my grandfather in 1893. They emigrated from Italy. My grandmother had 14 children, 12 survived to adulthood. She was really very old-school Italian. She had many health issues and was in and out of hospitals when I was young, I didn't see her much, other than holidays and an occasional Sunday visit. My grandfather died before I was born. He was in the U.S. Cavalry during WWI and ran a fruit and vegetable stall at the local marketplace.

My maternal grandmother was born in 1906. She was a wonderful woman, who treated everyone the same, and with respect, and she demanded the same from her kids and grandkids as well She had a hard life, her father died when she was 14 and she had to go to work instead of high school. Learning was important to her, and she saved as a teen and bought a set of encyclopedias and said she read them all cover to cover. She registered to vote the day after women got the right, and never missed voting in an election. She was frugal, but not cheap, and she was very generous with her time. I was very close to her, as she lived a five minute walk from my house. I spent hours with her listening to her stories, while she cooked or was teaching me to sew. She passed in 1985, and I still miss her.
My maternal grandfather was born in 1900 and was a piece of work If he didn't drink part of his pay on a Friday, he made decent money for the times. He was in the Navy from 1919-1921 and was stationed in Honolulu in what would become Pearl Harbor. He was a very cold person, and if things didn't directly involve him, he didn't care. He eventually stopped drinking in the 1950s, and although he was nicer, he still was cold. He had his own little den, and that's where he spent most of his time.

My grand parents and great grand parents were all alive in my childhood. My great great grandfather fought in the civil war. My father was born in 1930, so right in the middle of a lot of s**t.
They never talked about it but I can tell you, they were seriously depressed.

As an adult, I can look back on them and just see how much their lives were affected by reconstruction, then the civil war then WW1 and then the great depression.
But they never spoke about it

My maternal grandfathers family arrived on the coast of CT as ship builders in the early 1700’s they migrated eventually to western CT & eastern NY, a few gaining some wealth. My grandfathers direct family were laborers. One owned a diner. My grandfather, born 1905 left school in the 6th grade to go to work. He worked in hat factories, digging ditches and eventually as a school custodian.
He didn’t speak a lot. Lots of grunts. But he was extremely tolerant of his 10 grandkids. I grew up in a two family house and my maternal grandparents lived upstairs. That was the case with many neighborhood families.
My grandfather was my hero. He taught me carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, masonry & auto mechanics. He could build a house but could barely read or write.
There is a family story that in his late teens he rode in an old Indian motorcycle with a sidecar along with a buddy from Ct to Montreal and then headed west to Victoria BC before hitchhiking back home. I believe most of it.
He played a lot of penny poker & cribbage. And he was an avid fisherman.

My maternal grandmother was a housewife and later in life worked as a secretary. She said depression life was hard but she knew many others who had it much worse. We struggled but we managed was her saying. It being s small town neighborhood support was a priority. They shared and traded food, clothes and labor to help a neighbor.
My paternal grandparents died when my father was 13. Within about 6 weeks of each other.

Plus side of that two family house was an extra kitchen to raid and another tv to watch

My grandfather was born in the late 1890s grew up in a logging town and worked both as a logger and then as a farmer after the 1st war. He volunteered for the army in 1915 time frame and was deployed to Europe. He came back a changed person and became a farmer. He was a sports man a hunter and fishermen. He was the type of guy that would give you the shirt off his back. I remember back when I was 13 years old sipping my 1st beer with my father and grandfather.

I remember when he went into the hospital with throat cancer and the doctors kept doing surgeries to "save" him. I remember him well and miss him. Tony Rest In Peace,

Only 2 were alive by the time I was born. One was mean as hell. The other married one mean as hell.