It may seem insignificant trivia to most, but it boggles my mind to think that their lives overlapped, albeit for just a year or so.
My mom is almost 95 (and has a better memory than me).
I heard someone the other day and talk about our Constitution being “200 years old” (okay - it might have been an old youtube!”)
But it struck me that she has been around almost half the time that we have been a nation.
I knew an old guy years ago that worked with Thomas Edison. It took me three different times over beers after mowing his lawn and listening to his stories that it dawned on me that the “Tommy” he referred to was Thomas Edison. (”Well who the h*&% did you THINK I was talking about!!??”
My great grandfather went to find his brother, they hadn’t heard from him in months. He ran away and lied about his age to enlist in the NC 21st. He was 14. His brother, my 2nd great uncle, was dead, gut shot, died in the Union prison at Point Lookout, Maryland.
His grandfather fought in the Revolution. He was a dragoon in Paisley’s Regiment. He also served under his neighbor Joseph Winston in the Battle Of Guilford Courthouse. Joseph Winston was first cousin of Patrick Henry.
My own grandfather, son of the Confederate veteran, was born during Reconstruction. He was 86 when I was born. I’m in my late forties.
It’s not as unusual as you might think. Many men waited and married late, in order to acquire the means of supporting a wife and family.
When you think about lives, ages, and overlaps, it does indeed connect you with history, doesn’t it?
My Grandfather was a POW — in WW 1 in Russia during the Oct ‘17 Bolshevik revolution. He was German and captured on the Eastern Front. I have his memoirs. To think I talked with my Grandpa who was present at the birth of communism in Russia is amazing.
His son (my uncle - still alive at 92), was a newly graduated mechanical engineer in WW 2. He joined the Army and ran a shift at Oak Ridge National Lab enriching uranium for Little Boy that dropped on Hiroshima. I’m filled with awe when I talk with him.
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.