Tell us about your grandparents

seadoug

seadoug

Well-known Member
Location
Texas
There was a thread entitled "Granpa Can Fix It" that reminded me of how influential grandparents can be in our lives. I had both good and bad experiences. BTW, all my grandparents lived in backward small towns in the mountains of North Carolina. We lived in Florida but I visited them regularly. One summer, at 14 y/o, I flew there and stayed the summer with my favorite aunt and cousin.

Father's side:
My grandfather had been quite wild in his younger years but had given up the bottle in his later years and spent them trying to do good for others. He frequently baked cakes and pies and delivered them to his neighbors. His name was on one the plaques as one of the founders of the Baptist church in his small town. After he sold his "seed and feed" store he painted houses. Each time I would see him, he would give me a 50 Cent piece and he would take me with him when he painted. I have very fond memories of my time with him.

My grandmother was never a very nice woman, and she never really liked my mother. She would put me on her lap and tell me about how I would go off to war and die. :oops: She got a kick out of seeing me walk in her high heels at 3 years old. Come to think of it, she was downright evil. She did develop Alzheimer's so I'll chalk it up to the beginning stages.

Mother's side:
My grandfather was not a nice man when my parents were kids. He would pit them against each other to the point where they only became close when they became elderly. He had grown up an orphan so perhaps that affected him. He was a bigot and a chauvinist. As I was growing up, he always fancied himself the comedian and was always willing to share a joke. I remember he took me to Chimney Rock as a teen in his Dodge Dart and flew through the curves up to the mountain.

As I became an adult, he was actually very good to me. I sensed he knew I was gay but he overlooked it. We used to take walks up the hill outside his house. When my father passed away, he was there at the funeral and walked up the hill to his gravesite as I held his 94 year-old hand. He lived to 98.

My grandmother was a wonderful woman. She passed away at 57 due to a heart condition from rheumatic fever. I always remember her great peach pies. When she passed away, my grandfather married a woman 20 years his junior. She was a sweet woman, and he bossed her around up until the day he died. She always tried to make our family feel special but she was still my step-grandmother. I wish I'd gotten more time with my actual grandmother.

Any stories you wish to share? I came from a fairly dysfunctional family so I'm always touched by heartwarming stories about grandparents.
 

My paternal grandparents lived only a few miles away, so we saw them at least 3x a week, sometimes daily. We lived with them until I was two, so I was very close to them.

Grandpa was a house painter and paper-hanger when I came along, but prior to that he had been a movie theater owner. Before that, he and Grandma traveled with the circus; he had an "electric-man" act and she was his assistant. They did that until my dad got old enough to go to school and then they settled down.

Grandma didn't work outside the home except a year or so while my dad was in the service; she thought it was her "duty" to do defense work, so she worked assembling plane radio parts. She also sold high-end costume jewelry at "jewelry parties" (the same concept as Tupperware parties).

They were extremely "fun" grandparents who took us all kind of interesting places and played with us a lot. We were their life and we loved them dearly.

My maternal grandparents were also loving, but we only saw them 2-3 times a year as they lived several states away. That grandma was a homemaker and a piano teacher. Grandpa was a railroad employee who did welding on train engines. After years of that, he worked for the Naval shipyards as a master welder making propellers and other ship parts.

Because we didn't see them that often, we weren't as close to them as the paternal grandparents, but there was lots of love when we did see them.

I also can remember three of my great-grandparents. My maternal great-grandparents owned a farm in North Carolina and it was always fun to go visit them and they were very loving. My paternal great-grandmother I remember as a very, very old lady who smoked a corncob pipe and still wore long dresses. She was kind but not very involved with us, because of her age.

I can only hope to be as good a grandmother and great-grandmother as the ones I had. I'm trying very hard to achieve that aim.
 
My farther's parents...
My granddad was a Baptist preacher that worked on radios, he had a small room on the back of the house that was crammed full with radios, radio parts and glass tubes, all the grand kids found this room fascinating.
My grand mom was a small woman that wore her hair atop her head, she raised all kinds of veggies and white rabbits. Together they had five children and those five children would bring their entire families to visit my grandparents on Sundays...that tells you how tough my grandmother was...

My Mom's parents
I never new my grandfather on my mother's side but heard stories and saw pictures, he was a loner that worked very hard, he cleared a fifty acre farm with nothing but an ax and he put up with my grandmother who was somewhat lazy and made the kids do a lot of the work in her younger years, later in her life she lived alone and I stayed with her a lot as my mother worked and I got to be close to her.
 

My grand-father (mother's side) was a College professor in Japan. He frequently wrote letters to us, in perfect English, but, always apologized that it wasn't very good. My grand-mother was a rather sour, demanding person. Unfortunately, they never did manage to immigrate. Grandpa passed before Grandma.

On the paternal side, Grandmother passed fairly young, so, we didn't meet her. Grandpa was a cheerful drunk, who gave me the nickname I use here on the forum.
 
My mom's parents died before I was born. Her mom got her at 40 or 41 and she got me at 35. They were with 9 kids. Her mother was lighthearted and fun. Lol my dad, the first time he visited he didn't know what he saw. They were all making music with pots and pans. They hid Jews in their house during WWII and her dad and brothers had to go to a concentration camp for it.

After the war he started to drink to cope with that. The whole bunch was afraid when he drank cause he'd get loud and aggressive and then her mom and way older brothers and sisters would push her, a small kid, to go make daddy happy again cause he loves you so much. So my mom never got angry. A guy at work just hit her and she stayed sweet and took him to church.

She was not capable of getting angry, always letting everyone be friends like a peace dove. Her dad was a slaughter and her mom a housewife. When her dad died and her mom got sick, she at 17 got the money in to take care of her mom.

My dad's parents divorced. When I was a kid I only saw my grandmother. Stayed there a week for a holiday at her caravan or a few days in her flat. She visited a few times a year. When she died we got into contact with grandpa and his new wife. She was also sweet. She had been a nun. We went to her 100th birthday.
 
I feel like I should preface:

Mom’s side of the family is Jewish and they all lived in Europe during the holocaust except for her maternal grandparents, who lived in Northern Africa. In her immediate family, the holocaust claimed the lives of Mom’s two older brothers, an older sister, a baby sister, and her paternal grandparents. She estimated that about half her aunts, uncles, and cousins were also killed, and the rest escaped to various countries.

Mom’s parents escaped to Italy with her and her younger brother, and when things got ugly there, her mom was killed when a Catholic church was bombed while she and some other people were inside.

My Dad was in the Navy, and he met my Mom in Italy, and even though he was Catholic and everything was still too chaotic and time was too limited to bother with converting to Judaism, he married her and brought her to the US. Dad had 10 brothers and sisters, and his parents were alive and well on their dairy farm here in California, and Mom and Dad moved in with them.

So, I grew up on my paternal grandparents’ dairy til I was 15 and my parent's bought a house. I was very close to my grandfather, who we called Gramps. Gramps told really cool, funny stories, usually while he and I had breakfast together, which was always oatmeal on toast. He’d already worked for a couple of hours by then, Gramma would have just left for her job at a local cannery, and Dad would be out moving cattle and cleaning up after the first milking.

When he wasn’t telling stories over our breakfast, me and Gramps talked to the beautiful orb-weaving garden spider that lived just outside the window next to the breakfast table. Gramps told me what her web was for, and how she built, rebuilt, and repaired it as needed, and how she wooed and ate her husbands, and made egg sacs, and had hundreds of kids who left home by flying away on a web line they shot out of their butts.

Gramma would get home from work at around 7pm with juice from whatever fruit or vegetable the cannery was canning all over her white uniform and shoes, which looked exactly like a nurse’s uniform to me. Mom would be cooking dinner, and Dad would be out closing-up farm with Gramps. And every morning, Gramma woke me for school by singing “Dear little Frankie, will you get up? Will you, will you, will you get up?” and I would sing back “What will you give me if I get up? If I, if I, if I get up?”

And the negotiations would start. And they always ended with her verse of “A nice young lady with rosy cheeks, with rosy, rosy, rosy cheeks,” and I’d sing back “YUK! Please keep those ladies away from me, away, away, a long way from me.” But I’d get out of bed, and Gramma would laugh.

When I was really young, I felt like my 2 older brothers were better, smarter, and stronger than me, and Gramma always said just the right things to boost my self-confidence without over-doing it.

I didn’t meet my maternal grandfather until I was 13, and my Dad helped him immigrate to America, and he and Gramps bought him a tailor shop here in Sacramento. I went to work for him at the tailor shop when I was 15. After working on a dairy since age 5, to work with and really get to know my Jewish grandfather felt like stepping into another world.

He was hilariously funny, but his humor had a lot of wisdom in it. It made you laugh, but it demonstrated how people should live and be and treat others…there was a moral in there. I loved working with him, and I knew what he'd gone through and I really admired him. I loved him very much.
 
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Paternal Grandfather was born in Enniskillen, Ireland and became a steamboat captain which took spices from India to Britain and Europe. When they started opening up India with the railways he decided to move there and became a railway engine driver, where he met my paternal grandmother and got married. They had 3 boys and 3 girls. Unfortunately, he contracted pneumonia and died at the age of 42. My grandmother had a nursing degree and had to go back to work leaving the children in boarding schools.

Maternal grandfather was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He joined the Scottish regiment of the Black Watch Cameroonians' and was sent to various countries in Europe and demobbed in Lahore where he joined the Bengal Police Force and rose to the title of Deputy Superintendent of Police. , He was awarded a medal for courage intercepting a man who tried to shoot Mahatma Gandhi. Maternal grandmother's history is a little bit vague, but she too was born in India, and I think there might be a little bit
of tan, on her side.

I'm sorry now that I didn't ask many questions about their growing up as my mother said it was bad manners to ask personal questions in those days.
 
I only knew one of my biological grandparents....my maternal grandmother. I was told by my grand uncle that my bio mother's father was tall and looked like a White man. He lived in South Carolina where my grandmother was when she conceived. She never talked about him and now I regret not asking questions. I know his name, however and I've been trying to see if Ancestry can fill in the big gap. They've found relatives who are likely connected and share his surname, but no one remembers him.

My grandmother was a Christian woman who didn't "take no mess" as they used to say. She was of strong character and had physical strength. She lived in a senior building after moving from a private residence. In that building, which isn't in the best part of town, she'd go down to the mailbox in the lobby with a knife in her pocket. I'd pity the fool who tried to do anything to her. :LOL: Once the elevator got stuck between floors. She jumped up and out then rolled over on the floor. She was about 80 at the time.
 
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My paternal grandparents were very well off financially - he was a rancher, she had her hands full raising 9 children. They weren't a close family, nor did they necessarily look forward to grandchildren, but they were nice enough to me all the same. My parents and I moved 500 miles away when I was young, so I have few childhood memories.

My maternal grandparents were very poor farmers. That grandfather died of a coronary around age 48, so I barely remember him. My grandmother re-married some years later (photo with 2nd husband below). He was as poor or more so than her first husband, but they were very sociable people and lived a full life - friends always coming and going at their house. He treated me as if I was his own grandchild, playing games with me, taking me fishing. It's strange how clear those memories still are after all these years.

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My mother’s parents were city folks.

My grandfather was a fireman that lived at the firehouse when working. This gave him plenty of cover to have a mistress on the side. It was one of those well known secrets that everyone knew but didn’t discuss. Eventually he and his mistress moved away to start a new life, in exchange for his freedom he signed over his pension to my grandmother. They never divorced.

My grandmother’s parents came from England and she lived a very prosperous and privileged life as a child. She grew up in a big house with a live in ‘girl of all work’ and a German ‘day cook’.

Time took its toll on the family finances and as a young mother of two she replaced the help and became the family’s main source of income.

During WWII she was trained as a machinist. When the war ended she was fired, without notice, to make a job opening for a returning soldier. She went on to be a cook in a local hospital.

When I went to her house we always walked to Center City and spent the day doing small errands, had lunch in one of the department store restaurants. In the afternoon we would stop and buy a treat at The Planters Peanut store of the Karmelkorn store for the bus ride home.

My fathers parents were country people.

My grandfather was a philandering mailman and upstanding pillar of the community that was involved in many local organizations. Another well kept secret that everyone knew but few mentioned.

My grandmother owned and operated a small farm. She was also involved in many local organizations and local politics. I spent my early years, with my family, in her big old rambling sixteen room house. She took care of me from the time I was born while mother worked in a factory. In many ways, I was closer to her than I was to my mother.

They were all good people that took what life threw at them and handled it the best they could.

They were also good examples of people that would have had very different lives if they had grown up in a world with modern contraceptives that could have helped to change the trajectory of their lives.
 
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That's my grandma and in the last one are all the known ones. The one on the right, 4th from above was a daughter from a slave in Surinam. And the guy with the cap, no sorry the one with the beard, was the dahlia king who invented dahlia's, but he wasn't a great businessman and gave all his inventions away for free lol.
 
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My mothers father died at the end of the first world was, leaving a pregnant wife.My mother was born and her mother died of the Spanish flu when my mother was 6 months old. It was a strange story, but apparently her mother married an American soldier, because he brought his "daughter " to the US when she was about 3 years old. He found out that she was deaf when they got to the Panama Canal. He being a bachelor had no clue that she should have been pretty noisy at that age.

My 6ft 4in father met my 4ft 9in mother and married her and 2 years later I came along. She left us when I was 5. So my paternal grandparents raised me. I loved them dearly and miss them every day of my life, my grandma especially. I was so lucky to have had her to raise me.
 
As I'm from a single parent family, my one and only grandfather died of TB that he caught in the trenches in WW1. He died in 1925 when my mum was five years old. My grandmother died of colon cancer in January 1939. So she was spared the Second World War, though not the pain of cancer.

I was born in 1950, and as such I never knew either one of them, and as I was an only child, there were only my mum's brother and two sisters that I ever knew. All of them are gone now of course, my aunts both outlasted their husbands, and of my cousins, there's only one left who's older than me as far as I know, and he's in Australia and I've no idea if he's even alive. So I'm the oldest one in the UK of our family, and apart from me there's just two cousins in Bristol that are younger than me left from my generation of the family.
 
I only knew my paternal grandfather who lived with us until he died at 87 when I was 10. He was a builder as was my father. He was a good man and well known for his work in the area. He was hard of hearing and there was a special hearing device in his pew at church. There was also one in our breakfast nook where he sat by the window.

The other grandparents I know only through formal portraits. The exception is one candid shot of my maternal grandmother where she looks tall and slim and happy and is holding a cat. Maybe that is where I got my love of cats.
 
I only knew one grandparent -- my grandmother on my mother's side -- and I didn't know her very well, even though I stayed with her for a few months when I was maybe 13. My grandparents on my mother's side immigrated from Lithuania, but I don't know when exactly. I do know that my grandfather was an alcoholic and died from cirrhosis of the liver. They had five children: three boys and two girls.

The boys (my uncles) all went to college and became engineers. My aunt went nuts when her fiancé died in a car crash and spent the rest of her life in a mental institution. I only met her once. My mother had severe mental issues, also. Something obviously happened to the girls in that family during childhood that screwed them up. My aunts and uncles are all gone now, so there's no one to ask if I wanted to.

My grandfather on my father's side died when my father was young so he basically grew up without a father. I don't know how he died, though. I don't know anything about my father's mother. She must have died before I was born or something, and I never heard my father talk about her. Who knows what their stories were. My father had some serious psychological issues, too. He couldn't hold a job and became homeless in the '90s. I had no way to help him since I was in college during that time and was just barely getting by myself.

What a screwed up family.
 
My grandparents raised me from the age of 9 after my parents were killed. They lived on a small farm that produced enough money to give the 3 of us a good life. I did my chores on the farm. The older I got the more work I did. I enjoyed every minute of it because I knew the work was for our benefit. It’s what paid the bills and anything we needed and some things we just wanted.

I didn’t get an allowance. Gramps would give me money to pay for my school lunches and a haircut. In the summer, I would get a buzz job. The kids I went to school with wouldn’t recognize me at first. After they knew it was me, they would laugh, but then some of them got a buzz job too. In the summer while I was just a kid until 15, Gramps would slip me a $10 bill that I would save as much as I could of it. I would try to save a $100 by the end of summer.
 

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