Now I’m one person closer to being the oldest person in the world!
There are now nine people on earth who were born in the 1800s.
These old people keep dying!!!
God bless him. Imagine the changes he’s seen over his lifetime (not all of them good). I was blessed to have a great grandmother who lived to be 107. I only wished I wasn’t a typical, self-centered teenager back then and learned more about her life and the things she saw and experienced.
Bush’s fault
This is something so obvious yet in a deep way shocking to me.
Both my grandparents were born in the 1800’s. They were married before WWI. It was natural when I was growing up for older people to understand and know about the turn of the century (1800-1900). I remember one woman telling me about all the horses on the roads in NYC, and the coal furnaces they all used.
When I watched the Memorial Day parade it was full of WWII vets and they were fairly young men. There was always a contingent of WWI vets, older, but a group of about 8. My mom told me she used to see the Civil War Vets in the parades - they were old, but they were still around.
As Orwell says, the Past is a Different Country. All that knowledge disappears, and people just forget it, and everything changes.
My great gandfather was still alive when I was born and we were inseparable until he died about a year later in 1951.
He was born in 1855. I would have loved to speak with him about his life.
Oh, what’s not really clear from this article, is that this was the last man alive from the 19th century. No living person now was born in the 1800’s.
His mom is taking the news very hard.
Helen Thomas isn’t included because she technically is classified as a fossil.
Wow, the guy’s almost as old as the stuff in my fridge.
Most of us, except of course those pesky ‘Millenials’, have spanned two centuries! WOW!
IBITHWD (In Before I Thought He WAS Dead!)
One of my Grandmothers was born in 1895 in Scotland. She became a nurse to help with the wounded of WWI then going on over in Europe. When the Kaiser’s Zeppelins bombed London (1916-17) she no longer felt safe and emigrated to the USA.
She met my Grandfather in the shipyards of Philadelphia and soon had a passel of kidets to keep her busy. When we came along she would answer questions for hours at a time about her childhood and growing up in the Edwardian British Empire. She always wanted to go to India to see everything she had read about in Rudyard Kipling’s books.
We all stayed up late on July 21st, 1969 to see Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. All of a sudden my Grandmother started crying softly. I asked her if she was ok and she stated that she had “...lived too long, I saw the Wright Brothers plane fly in Le Mans France in 1908 and have now seen man fly to the moon” I didn’t understand until many years later what she meant. She passed peacefully in her sleep in 1980 after reading from her favorite author: R. F. Delderfield. I was overseas in the military at the time and unable to get back home. I still miss her and her sharp Gaelic tongue (and choice of words!) used whenever we got ourselves into trouble. :)
Another poorly-written title. Ah hell, this is as good as it gets—it will only be worse in the future.
1897... that’s the year my grandfather was born. A World War 1 vet, fought in the Ottoman Empire. He died in 1976 when I was a toddler. There’s a great photo of him holding me in one arm and holding a cigarette in the other...