What did YOUR grandfather do?

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One was a master carpenter. I would consider some of his work art.

The other was a teacher and novelist.
 
ron1625 said:
One of my Grandfathers worked down the coal mines of South Wales, no idea what the other did, never got to meet either of them but started to delve into the "family tree", not found any cut throats or pirates yet but gone into it with an open mind.

One of my grandmothers worked in the munitions factories again the other..no idea!
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Recently found out my Grandfather (the miner) was also a fireman during WW2
 
My pappy worked in the coal mines in Eastern Ky. He retired when he was 45 due to black lung. Dangerous, Dirty, and low paying work back then.
 
My grandfather was a lawyer in Mississippi who defended blacks in court during a time extreme unrest. He eventually had his house burned down and had to send his entire family to Massachusetts to be safe.

He later became a judge up north.

He basically played the role of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird.
 
johnlocke said:
My grandfather was a lawyer in Mississippi who defended blacks in court during a time extreme unrest. He eventually had his house burned down and had to send his entire family to Massachusetts to be safe.

He later became a judge up north.

He basically played the role of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird.
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wow...... whats up JL?:toast:
 
My maternal Grandfather was a boiler maker on ships. He loved working the ship yards. When Jacksonville shipyards were slow he would go up to SC for a week at a time to get work there. I still remember vividly the day he passed away and I was 6 years old. He had just recently quit drinking and coincidentally he was killed when a drunk driver ran a stop sign and pulled right in him path.

My paternal Grandfater I don't know much about. He died of lung cancer when my dad was 7 years old. I do know he was in the Navy. My dad got alot of pictures of him when my grandmother passed away. It is scary how much I look like a man I never knew.
 
My Maternal Grandfather pretty much raised me as a kid. An awsome guy with a big heart and a big hug. I never knew anyone as caring as that man. (He just passed away a month ago.....)

My Paternal Grandfather was retired when I met him for the first time when we moved back East from California (Age 6). He lived upstairs and maintained one of the best gardens in Arlington. (I even shoveled da poop to keep er goin!)

Since my hobby back then was eating... I managed to eat one of his prized tomatoes.... (Seeds ya know).. Wellllll ... He plotted.... He waited.... Then he planted some of the hottest Habenero peppers available at the time and waited.......... for me to go after one of them.

I did! and he was there to see it! Probably one of the best days of his life the old bastard.... I turned Blue... then Green... then Red. Thought I was gonna die. Ol Grandpa loved every second of it. :)

Lawman
 
Aime,

I know I'm not making you happy. I also know that you're prolly happy that I'm not stuck doing the shit you had to do. I've booze problem, and I know that doesn't mean much to you. You drank more, by volumn, that I could. You also worked harder and deserved it.

Man: It ain't gonna happen. It's all ****ed. Sorry. Love you, Aime.
 
My paternal grandfather and his brother both became interested in cars. They were both immigrants from Ireland in the late 1800's as children. They both started working on cars in the early 1910's. My grandfather was a good mechanic and driver and became a chauffeur for a wealthy family. The family lived in North Carolina (tobacco company President), but the wife was from Maryland and kept a second home in Maryland. That was where my grandfather worked for them. They had a stable of cars; Lasalles, Dusies, Cords, Packards, all great American iron of a bygone era. My grandfather loved cars, although my grandmother never allowed him to own one (supposedly), since he could bring one home every night. When he died, we discovered 2 garages he had been renting that had 5 cars in them and another 3 cars that he kept at his brothers dealership. Move of them were typical chevys and fords, but he did have Desoto with a hemi in it and apparently his favorite, a very rare Nash Healey. His brother had a pretty good gift of gab and ended up selling cars, eventually owning his own Pontiac dealership. I learned to drive and took my driving test in one of his cars, a '68Pontiac Lemans convertible.

I never knew my maternal grandfather, he died before my mom and dad even met. He died young, in his 40's. He was a civil engineer that helped design and build the railroad system in Maryland, Penn and West Virginia.
 
Both granddads were machinists/tool & die makers at the Foxboro Company. Paternal died when I was 10 days old in 1959; just had to put the maternal granddad into a rest home (age 95).
 
Moms side, no idea, never really knew him.

Dads side. I don't know what he did before he was drafted or enlisted in the military and served in WWII. After he worked at a grocery store for a while, then was a meter reader for the electric company before becoming a dispatcher then retiring in the 90's. Since he was with the electric company for so long, many times I was able to ride on their trucks in parades.
 
Grandfather was the lead engineer in designing the torpedoes for the U.S. submarine fleet that were used in the later stages of the cold war. I've been told one of them was lost in the prototype phase and he was on board one of the submarines that was racing the Russians to recover but I don't know all of the details or how the Russians knew one was lost.

I do remember when he died the Men in Black arrived to recover all of his briefcases, etc.
 
My paternal grandfather was a customs and excise officer. I never knew him as he died of a brain hemorrhage (I had a brain hemorrhage too, thanks grampa for the gene).
My maternal grandfather was a Royal Post member for many, many years. He was awarded an OBE (Order of the British Empire) medal for his long service - a very proud moment for our family.
 
My dad's dad was in the mob

My mom's dad was in the army

Edit: Dad's dad was in the mob, but is still alive. I think hes 80 or 90 years old still grows his own food to make his own pasta and walks something like 5 miles a day
 
Interesting thread, and I am envious of those who have great and extensive details of their grandparents lives.
My Dad was from a coal mining town in PA. His father as far as I know worked the mines for a short time, didn't serve in WWI, and raised three boys. He was a lineman for the utility company until his retirement. He died when I was 12, and my Dad was not one to talk of his Dad much. Grampy had one incredible talent, and that was calligraphy. When I was little and he would visit he'd always have his pens and ink and write beautiful script on little cards and give them to me. I have one with my name on it that he wrote for me and have saved it all these years. I think him and my grandmother both enjoyed the sauce, according to my Mom.

Maternal grandfather I know more of even though he died when I was 6. He and his wife raised 7 kids at the height of the Depression, in an unheated house in Woburn. You have to tip your hat to folks who survived those times, but Granpa was a nasty bastard that beat his kids and took no shit from anyone. He was a conductor for the railroad and in later years a gate operator at the Woburn train station. My Mom said he was as cold as ice. On July 4th each year, the family fireworks consisted of Grandpa going out in the backyard and firing a single round from his .38 into the sky. My mom's late sister inherited the "cold as ice" genes ( what a freaking bitch she was) but my Mom turned out like her Mom, a living saint, gentle, decent and loved by all who know her. Grandpa died when he had a stroke on a cross country train ride to California. My grandma and he were just retired in 1963, and my grandma had never been to the west coast, so they went by train. He was stricken on the journey and there was a doctor on the train that tended him until they got to Salt Lake City, where this doctor lived. They took him off the train, realized there wasn't much they could do to save him, and this kind doctor got back on the train east and stayed with Grandpa all the way back to Boston, and got him home in his bed where he died a few hours after arriving. My grandmother never did get to see California.
 
Both sets of grandparents were immigrants to the US.

My paternal grandparents came from a little town named Cugnoli in the Abbruzzi region of Italy. My grandfather Giovanni was born in 1877 and my grandmother, Carolina, in 1881. They entered the US at Ellis Island in July, 1909. They had 2 children at that time, but they are NOT listed on the ship's manifest. They settled in the Italian community in Niagara Falls, NY, but my grandparents became seasonal farm workers in a little town about 50 miles south, North Collins, NY, for several years. They wintered in Niagara Falls, and apparently my grandfather found permanent work there during WW I, making enough money for them to buy a small farm in North Collins in 1919. They had 9 kids in all, my grandfather raised livestock and grapes, and my grandmother raised vegetables for food and for sale. She had a large greenhouse with an ingenious elevated water tank to store water for her garden. The farmland is still in the family, although the original house, barn, and outbuildings have long since been cleared. My cousin built a log house on it in the 1980s.

My maternal grandparents came from Poland, but I know a lot less about their backgrounds than the Italian lineage. They came to the US at different times. My grandfather, Kasper, was born between 1880 and 1887 somewhere in Poland. I recently found a clue, in the form of a letter from the 1950s-1960s in an old family photo album, to the town he's from but since I don't read Polish, this is still a work in progress. He came to the US about 1910, settled in Buffalo, NY and worked in various factories until he retired. He died in 1959. I think of all my grandparents, he had the unhappiest life in the US. He was a farm boy stuck in the city, and he hated it, which is probably one of the reasons that he ended up an alcoholic, although not a very bad one in that he could hold a job and limited his drinking to week-end binges.

My grandmother, Marianna, was born in 1902, again somewhere in eastern Poland. Her immigration path is impossible to trace because she came into the US using somebody else's name. Apparently, a family in her village was all set to emigrate when one of the daughters died. Being frugal, they didn't want to waste the ticket and paper work, so my grandmother came under the dead girl's name as my grandmother was one of six sisters.

Marianna's family were converted Jews, but we don't know if it was my great grandfather or great-great grandfather who converted. I believe my great grandfather's name was John, which would probably mean he was baptized a Catholic. The family surname, however, was definitely Jewish. All of my grandmother's siblings were murdered in the Holocaust. My uncle, who served in Europe in WW II, apparently talked to people from the village where they had lived and found out that they had all been lined up against a barn and shot during the early part of the German invasion of Russia.

My maternal grandparents married in Buffalo about 1920. Shortly afterward, they moved from "Polonia" as the heavily Polish East Side Buffalo neighborhoods were called to "the 'burbs" of Black Rock, a neighborhood in the NW corner of Buffalo where my grandfather worked in foundries. They had 6 children but only 4 survived infancy.

In the 1930s, my grandmother, kids in tow, worked as a farm worker in North Collins, just up the road from my paternal grandparents' farm. That's how my parents met: he was about 15, she was 11. My grandmother used her earnings from summer farmwork to invest in real estate, buying two family homes where they lived in one flat and rented the other. Eventually, with my grandfather earning good money during WW II and her kids grown up, she was able to buy a small grocery store which she operated, with my mom, until she died in 1952.

As the unofficial "family historian" for both sides of my family, I can't tell you how important it is to find out as much family history as you can from your parents/grandparents/great grandparents while they are alive. Even your oldest aunts and uncles can be invaluable sources. Unfortunately, I was "too busy" doing other things when I was younger and these relatives were still alive to pass on their knowledge, so mostly I've had to piece together my family history from public records and family legends.
 
FrankWardteddinghay-1.jpg




My Granddad ^. Farmer. Oldstyle. Northern Vermont.



Cheers, BostonTim
 
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