family stuff....grandpa's story were true.

When I first met my wife and became her good friend(long before we married), I used to go along with her on family get togethers and whenever her mother and father had family over, Id be around alot.
Her father was much older than my father and most of our fathers.
He didnt start a family until he was in his forties.
So I listened to all the family stories for years.
I knew her father was stationed in SanAntonio texas in WWII and my wife told me the day before he was scheduled to depart for Europe and combat, someone in an army band got ill and he was a drummer and they pulled him out to join the army band. I guess it was quite a break for him.
Her grandfather, well, by the time I met him, he had lost most of his mental capabilities,(a nice way to put it), senile? Alzheimers? whatever, he was off somewhere and whenever I was around, they used to sit grandpa next to me and say, here, you talk to him.
I didnt mind, he told incredible stories about how he owned motels down south, how he built a raceway, and explained his job for the military during the world war, he just never made it clear to me who exactly he worked for.
The rest of the family would verify some of his wild stories, and I knew he worked for the military somewhere, but I never questioned the validity of his stories, they were cool and he needed a new set of ears to listen to him.
I really never minded.


I never questioned him.

then my wife pulls this document out of the boxes and boxes of old pictures we have in our attic.
I guess his stories were true.(the document is dated 1918 through 1919)

Sounds like you gave him the respect and attention he deserved. Good on you, and with gratitude to him.

Yep, Never minded listening to the stories Sharon's Mom and Dad would tell me, no matter how many times I heard them. Gotta respect the elders, I say...

Cool Document find Allen!

Old Man Stories

My kids groan, pass out, say,'DAD', or just leave the room when I get off on my old man stories.

Actually they don't do that---They just want to.

So, if you ever want to hear old man stories, just let me know.

Enjoy,

Jim

I always listened to old man stories--found them almost fascinating. Now it seems I'm starting to tell some of them.Not sure how I like that.

My brother who is ten years older than me was my maternal grandfather's pet. I didn't mind it, I was the outdoorskid, horse crazy, fishing/hunting/farming crazy kid. By the time I was around, grandpa was finishing his working career. My dad bought him a scroll saw and he built many beautiful shelves with it. That might be my claim to my woodworking craze. Anyway, just a couple months ago my brother was up and spent the night and whenever this happens we talk about anything and everything. I started in on some of Grandpa's growing up stories. (my great grandfather lost his farm due to hog cholera) Some of the stories my brother knew bits and pieces of, others he had never known (due to age differences I am sure, when Grandpa was of the age to sit and shoot the bull, I was just married and we would use one of their spare bedrooms when coming home to visit, where my brother had bought his farm and was struggling with raising a family far from home) Anyway, brother said before leaving for his home the next morning, "thanks for sharing some of Grandpa's stories with me", made both of us feel that Grandpa was living on in our hearts through his stories.

Allen, I guess it is time for you to make a frame with glass for this document. Thanks for reminding me to remember my past families stories.

I wish my Dad had told me stories, hardly know anything of his youth, or of my grandparents, who passed away before I was old enough to know them.

I remember my grandfather (my dad's dad) I was only 7 or 8 when he passed away. But he used to sit in his wheelchair in front of the radio and tell me stories about the Spanish American War as well as hunting and fishing stories with my Dad.
I have some great old pictures. I should find a way to preserve them somehow.
Great story Allen.

Too many wonderful stories and important (oral) records of history are lost because folks don't want to listen to old timers talking about them.
That document is an important piece of family history. It looks like it has been abused. It should be framed professionally with archival papers and UV resistant glass.

we didnt know we had it frank.
when my fatherinlaw moved to florida back in the 80s, he gave us all his boxes of family pictures. My wife's family loved pictures.And they saved everything.

One thing you guys might want to think about is recording some of those stories.

We had Sharons mom write down some stories for us while she was still alive, but I sure wish I had some recordings of her voice.

I sat down with my dad last time he was here and interviewed him using a digital recorder.

If you're not sure how to get started, go to storycorp. They've got resources like questions and such to help you get started.

we have film of both our families going back to the first (brownie?) cameras, whatever they were. Alot were without sound, but its a blast to look at members of my family I never met.
We have alot of sound movies also of my wifes family.
We put them all onto video tape, now we have to convert the video to a cd.

Bryan Cowing said:

I wish my Dad had told me stories, hardly know anything of his youth, or of my grandparents, who passed away before I was old enough to know them.

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I know the feeling... my dad never talked about his youth too much... I knew some from Grandma's stories and every now and then he would tell something... and Mom often told some stories of their early life together... my dad was a share cropper and when he first started farming, he didn't have his own mules... he would take raw, green unbroken mules and break them for the owner, work them a season, then give them back and start over with another young pair... some of the mishaps with those mules were interesting.

I barely remember my Grandpa...(Dad's father) he died in 1945 when I was just almost 4... I remember the wake (or the "setting up" with the body) because I was interested in what was in that box everybody kept coming around and looking into... I tried to climb up on the casket stand and one of my uncle picked me up and held me so I could see into the box... from earlier time I remember standing at his knee and looking up to my grandfather... he was this white headed man who seemed to reach all the way to the sky...

allen levine said:

we didnt know we had it frank.
when my fatherinlaw moved to florida back in the 80s, he gave us all his boxes of family pictures. My wife's family loved pictures.And they saved everything.

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My family lost a huge amount of history in pictures. My grandfather was a pioneer in the use of color 35mm film. He and his partner were commissioned to do test work using movie film and prototype 35mm cameras. My Grandfather took many hundreds of slides of the Chicago area about 1920 and had them carefully cataloged and stored. Sometime about 1990 my parents got tired of storing them and threw them away.
My mother saved many hundreds of photographs from her childhood on and stored them in a suitcase. After she went into the nursing home I started cleaning out her home and found the suitcase. We tried putting stories with the pictures but this was right at the time she was declining mentally and I only got the stories with a couple of them. The rest are now just 'pictures'. I can't match time, place or people with them. BTW, I still have them.