Posted on 03/22/2013 10:41:47 AM PDT by Pharmboy
The last survivor of the Americans who were at Lexington Green on April 19, 1775, died in 1864 at the age of 96.
Simon Bolivar Buckner was an American general in WWII who was killed in 1945 near the end of the battle of Okinawa. His father was the Confederate general who surrendered Fort Donelson to Ulysses S. Grant in February 1862.
This Revolutionary War veteran died in March 1868. When I was a child I knew a woman who was born in February 1869 and lived into her 90s (the mother of a friend of my grandmother’s)—she was born less than one year after this man’s death and when Lincoln would have been President if he had not been assassinated.
Amazing.
My great-grandmother was born in the centennial year of the republic, 1876, and lived until 1977...until I was sixteen years old. She was born the same year as Custer led his men to disaster at Little Big Horn. That always amazed me when I was growing up. Still does I guess.
On the other side, one of my maternal great-great-grandfathers served in the Civil War although he was already in his 40s--he was born in 1820. He was 6 years old when Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died. I had a great-aunt and a great-uncle who lived long enough for me to know them, who remembered him (their grandfather).
Correction—that should have read 1854, not 1864. Jonathan Harrington, 16, was a fifer in the Lexington militia at the time of the battle of Lexington and died in 1854.
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