Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Stories About Your Grandparents?

My father's parents immigrated from Sweden. He went to the Alaskan Gold rush, she went to Seattle, where they met.
When WWI broke out, my grandfather was drafted, but my grandmother got him out, because my aunt was already born.
My father was born when my grandmother was 48.

My mother's parents met in Bristol Tennessee and married when she was 12. She found a better farm in Bristol VA that went taxes, for only $200, so they moved.
When I was 5 years old in 1956, they put me to work hoeing weeds in the tobacco patch on their $200 farm.

To find out about your own grandparents, read the 1940 census.
https://1940census.archives.gov/index.asp

Paternal grandfather died before I was born - came over from Germany himself at 17 and eventually served in the state legislature.
Maternal grandfather took off for parts unknown, also before I was born.
Paternal grandmother was the only one I ever knew. Didn't see her much but remember onion sandwiches and playing a card game with some small cards with numbers in different-colored quadrants.
Maternal grandmother died before I was born.

Haaa, that happened to me one time. I had to spend the night at my Grandmother's house one time and I wanted to watch something cool like Gun Smoke or Star Trek, but we had to watch Lawrence Welk. It was the only time I ever watched it. I thought it was weird as schit with the bubble machine. I'll never forget it.

Frankie Lane...

I never knew my mom's folks. They were both gone before I was born. My dad's dad was gone before I was born too. Dad's folks were farmers, and had homesteaded a beautiful creek bottom near the town of Washingtonville, Ohio. Grampa was also a carpenter. Grandma was very envolved in getting women the right to vote in Ohio. We have a box full of badges and campaign ribbons from her foray into politics. Mom's mom and dad were German, which was a source of consternation for my Dad's french parents. Mom's mom was actually related to a pilot who flew with Baron Von Richtofen. He was a confirmed ace and killed in action.

Saturday evenings
Bout a 2 yr period
Late 60,s early 70,s
Dinner and Lawrence Welk at Grammy and grampy,s

It was torture......

Grammy also had a prick male siamese cat named "Tara" of all things.
More like terror to me at times.
I did get even with that fugger one time when I yanked the fugg outta the lenght of his kinked vertebra tail.
Cat would go away when he seen me after that.

Mutha fugga.....

Thanks.

And then there was Great-Grandpa Claude.

Claude came from largely Alsatian stock, but they'd been here for quite some time, so he was All-American by most ways of looking at things. He was a young itinerant accountant when he came into Meadville, PA back around 1900. A buddy of his tried to get him to go to the Klondike with him. Claude played it safe and stayed home. The buddy came back a few years later without much to show for it. I've got the gold nugget tie bar he brought to Claude.

Agnes was the belle of Meadville. She was of Mayflower stock and was also a Shreve. Henry Miller Shreve, a great uncle had run the first steamboat up the Mississippi. Shreves went all the way back to the court of Queen Elizabeth. Anges was prime A1 DAR/WASP breeding material, and every man in Meadville wanted her. She was also drop-dead gorgeous by the standards of the time.

Claude came to town before the Spring Cotillion and by fall he was leaving with Agnes on his arm. The moved to Cleveland, where they bought a lot in Cleveland Heights. Grandpa immediately built a garage and they lived in the garage for a time until he could finish the house. By then, he'd decided he didn't like being an accountant and decided to take work as a carpenter with the May Company, a big department store in Cleveland. He spent the next 50 years doing the woodwork for all their window displays at the downtown store. Claude became an expert Musky fisherman on the Cuyahoga River.

When Claude welcomed Whitey as a son-in-law, marrying his youngest daughter, he found that he had the closest he was ever going to having a son. Grandpa Whitey had grown up with an aging and infirm father, it had left a definite hole in his life that Claude filled. Great Grandpa Elmer lived to be just shy of 99, but he was crushed in a steel foundry accident and pronounced dead at one point when he was 40. That was just about the time Whitey was born. Whitey and Claude latched onto each other and spent the next 30-some years hunting and fishing together.

Great Grandpa Elmer slowly recovered from the steel mill accident. Sometime in the 1940's he was entertaining the bevy of maiden aunts he'd collected around him when he retired to the bathroom after supper and did not come out for quite some time. After a half-hour, he called for a pair of slip-joint pliers to be passed under the door, and he emerged another half-hour later with a piece of his own rib that he'd removed with the pliers from his own anus. He was covered in his own blood, but he was triumphant. He lived another 20 years in relatively good health. They finally had to put him in a home after they found him in his 99'th year up a tree, sawing off a dead limb. The only problem was he was sitting on the wrong side of the limb.

I could write a book about 'em if I were the literary type. Good people; all of them. Paternal grandfather born in Scotland; came here in 1914, age 21, and in 1917 crossed into Canada with a few others & joined the Canadian Army. Did 17 months in the trenches with the Canadian Machine Gun Corps. Stopped off in Scotland on the way home after the war and married my grandmother. They both grew up poor as most working class Scots did and enjoyed stuff in the USA they would have never known otherwise...... Like owning a home, and even a car ! Maternal grandparents both born here to German immigrants. Grandmothers family from Bavaria. Grandfathers folks from the Alsace- Lorraine region of Germany. My German great-grand parents all showed up in the early 1880's when there was a big wave of folks from Germany. I've traced down a lot of other stuff about all of them since I retired and joined Ancestry.com. I knew all the basics but now I'm filling in details.

Paternal grandpaw died when I was 3, barely remember him. Grandma lived into her 90's. Remember her well, but wasn't around her much and glad I wasn't. Nice to visit but I could only take her in 'small doses'.

Maternal grandparents I knew well. Grandmother was the 'salt of the earth'. Granddad was of the 'old school'. He grew up farming and what ever it took to raise a family during the depression. He called things the way he saw them and didn't care where he was or who was around. Family came first, no if's and's or but's. He had me in my first bar fight when I was 6 yrs. old. I didn't actually participate, but I was there. He loved to hunt and fish and knew more ways to illegally catch fish than I thought was possible. He mellowed some in his old age, but I suspect there were some folks that were glad to see him go. He asked for and gave no quarter.

I would imagine there is more to that story likely ending with a "good for them".

I bet he never thought the disintegration of the FBI to this degree was ever "possible". But it is.

Just started filling in names and dates on Ancestry this past weekend. Had a head start thanks to some relatives writing some of the info down and preserving it. Now to fill in some details. Pretty interesting so far.

My paternal grand parents - They had 10 children, one died early (1941), my Dad (the oldest) died 12 years ago, the rest are still with us.
Grandma was a saint. Even tempered and a good mother and wife. She was a teacher. She passed in 1983.
Grandpa was an alcoholic and was a mean drunk. He did work hard his whole life. Worked on the AlCan highway. He passed in 1988.

My maternal grand parents - They had 5 children, as far as I know there is only one still alive. My Mom died in 2011.
Grandma was full-blood Dane and ran the family as such. Grew up on a farm in south-central NE. Boy, could she cook . . . and cheat at cribbage. She passed in 1992.
Grandpa was in WWI and got mustard gassed in France. Had health problems after that, Crotchety, gruff old man but did nice leather work. He passed in 1960.

great grand ma rogers blasted a groid with a double barrel and buried him out in the pasture, way back in the early 1900s. She was on the farm alone up by Sudan Tx..

Both sets of grandparents were born in the 1880s. Never actually met either of my granddads. Paternal grandad was born on Feb 29th in a leap year so his actual birthdays were four years apart. Said he used to joke with folks saying he'd fathered his first child before he was 5 and had 6 kids total before he was in his teens. He was a blacksmith and died when my dad was still pretty young himself. Dad was the youngest of his six siblings (that lived). Dad said his dad was fond of motorcycles and kept one at his blacksmith shop all the time.

Strongest memories of my paternal grandmother was her babysitting me as a tyke and trying to chase me down with a keen switch in her hand to whip me with for doing something mean. One of her big pleasures was a fresh new can of Copenhagen snuff, sitting in a rocking and watching or listening to a Billy Graham show. Her hair was snow white and kept it in a bun but when she let it down to brush it reached below her waist.

Only memory I have of my maternal granddad I couldn't have been more than 3 years old at the time and was at his funeral. Was told he drove a horse pulled "dead wagon" back during the big flu epidemic and never quite got over it.

Maternal grandmother was a simple, salt-of- the-earth type woman. Out of bed well before sunup, worked all day and in bed soon after sundown. Never had indoor plumbing, slept on a feather bed, covered in homemade quilts, never cooked on anything but a wood burning stove, heated her house with a coal grate and a big cast iron coal stove. Never wore shoes unless it was freezing cold or she was going somewhere that shoes were required, Her husband was disabled and hospitalized before half of their 6 living kids were in their teens (my mom was the youngest). She walked to a town a few miles from where they lived out in the boondocks and cleaned houses for rich folks, sold or traded eggs, cream and home cured pork for staples, raised a big garden,with the help of the oldest kids and finished raising their kids. She was still out of bed before sunup feeding hogs, cow, chickens and cooking and working around her little place all day up until just a short while before she died in her mid 90s. Nothing she liked better than having a house full of company. Always fixed me blackberry cobbler when I'd sleep over and was always kind. God only knows how many squirrel, rabbits, racoon and quail that woman cooked in her life.

When I was five years old, they would sit me next to my grandfather while he ran the outboard. Often he would say he was having trouble with the motor, and ask me to hold his rod. Odd how many fish I landed while he puttered on the motor.

My Maternal Grandparents were the only ones I knew. Grandmother was great full of personality.
Grandaddy was orphaned at 12. Died a millionaire. He was a hunting legend. Larger than life. He died when I was 6. I was with him one summer on an Island riding in the back of his scout. He stopped and asked me if I'd ever had a hawks foot. I said no. He pulls his 22 pistol leaned out the window shoots once at a hawk circling. It folded up and fell dead in the back of that scout. He put the pistol away and acted like he expected it to happen that way. Celebrities asked him to take them duck and turkey hunting. In my mind John Wayne was trying to act like him. I wish he would have lived longer.

I have a neat story about my grandpa Herb. My dad was at a funeral and this really old lady came up to him and says, "are you Herb's son?" . Dad says, uh, yes? She says I have a story for you. I was there the day Herb was born. Oct 18, 1918. We went over to their house to see the new baby. But when we got there, the baby was laying in a box on the wood pile on the porch. This was in Minnesota and it was cold! We went into the house and my mama asked Herb's mama, "Why is your baby on the wood pile on the porch?". Herb's mama said, "Because he was born dead". My mama told her, "the hell he is! He is crying out there. You go get your baby!".

I would kinda like to thank that old lady myself cuz if my grandpa wouldn't have made it.....no me!

All my grandparents were great people.

In about 1920 or so, my grandfather Arthur Richardson was the track maintenance foreman on the railroad that ran between Arapahoe and Lander WY, this was in the days when almost all of this work was still done by hand, he had a handpowered cart to run up and down the track with, I still have a photo of him on that cart.

One day while working the track bed, he came across a Colt 1903 automatic, caliber 38 ACP. It was in good shape with a little pitting on one side, must have lain there a while. He brought it home and it has been in the family ever since, I have it and still take it out and shoot it every so often.

my grandfather had a construction biz in the teens and 20's and built whole coal mining towns. for any of you western PA people familiar with Colver and Revloc, he built most of the mine house in those towns. he was doing good until the depression hit and never really recovered from what my mom told me. he died in the 40's.

My maternal grandparents both lived long lives. Grandpa passed at 84 and Grandma at 94. He started out working road crews with his team of white Belgians. He was especially proud of those horses and loved to tell of how they worked in unison. He often used them on the farm to haul firewood and could hook them up to a skid of logs, throw the reins up over their backs and they'd go to the farm yard where Grandma would unhook them and send them back to the woods. Grandpa said they'd do that all day long. They both grew up and married during the depression. Grandma was fond of saying, "if you've ate beans, you've ate." There were times when some families were thankful to have beans. They fared okay during those years as they had the farm, milked enough cows to sell milk and always had a big garden. Grandma canned on a wood cook stove until the day they moved off the farm in their 80's. Grandpa suffered a knee injury when working the road crews. Apparently a careless rock wagon driver with a green team let them get away from him. Grandpa tried to scramble up the cut bank to get away from the team and wagon and ended up slipping and going under the wagon. It was partially loaded and the back wheel rolled over both his knees. He was back at work the next day but he limped the rest of his life. I never heard him complain. Ever. He dairy farmed and drove school bus into his 70's and I never knew him to be sick.

My paternal grandfather passed at 77. I never knew my paternal grandmother as she passed when Dad was a teenager. Grandpa was of the same ilk as my mom's Dad. A dairy farmer, tough as nails and a good man. He had a tremendous sweet tooth but had all his teeth, in good shape, to the day he died. I remember watching him turn a jar of honey up and take a couple of gulps. He was never fat. I guess you can get away with that when you do physically hard work every day. He too loved his horses and farmed with them up into the 50's. At that point he bought an 8n Ford and farmed the rest of his days with it. He was especially noted for his fancy poultry. Dad always had a lot of chickens but he was a pragmatist about them. Eggs or meat. He didn't care about show chickens. Grandpa sure loved them though and always had a bunch. He was hell on hawks and owls. Even after it became a legal faux paux to manage raptors for the protection of one's property. I remember him using his few remaining 25 rimfire rounds to finish off owls and hawks he caught in foot traps near the chicken coop. He would set them on top of a tall post and wait for the marauders to land. Before anyone blows a gasket, I'm not condoning what he did. But I'm also not condemning it. He was born of another time and raptors were to be killed if they took an interest in his chickens.

I miss my grandparents. They were wonderful people and a positive influence in my life.