Tell me one interesting fact about one of your grandparents

[listsandbudgets]

Because I'm bored and nosey.

My nan could speak Italian but only in the imperative because she and my grand dad had Italian prisoners of war on their farm during world war 2

Unimaginative I guess if you'd worked on it you would feel like that!

I only actually knew one grandparent and she didn't do anything particularly exciting aside from have my father at age 40 (only child) and flat out complete blank refused to say who the father was. She took that to her grave and I do quite admire her refusal to ever say.

I tried to tentatively ask her once and she nonchalantly said 'oh you know about that, do you?' I miss her, she was lovely :)

Possibly. It is a longstanding family joke to point to a road anywhere and claim that you built it though.

My mums parents got married in 1945 after just 2 dates!!

He was 31 & she was just 20.

They stayed married for 58 years until he died but it wasn't always a happy marriage.

Also, one of his sisters married one of her brothers around the same time!

My granddad had a price on his head during WWII because he was a leader of the resistance in Rotterdam. He got caught three times but managed to escape before the Germans knew who he was (he had a false ID). He survived the war, and on his 105th birthday (his last) the Dutch king came to visit him!

Both my paternal grandparents were born on farms in rural Arkansas during the Depression. They never told me much but I know they had no running water or electricity and they were hard times.

I've researched my genealogy and every ancestor I've discovered, came to America in the 17th or 18th century. I'm also part (1/16) Native American. Sometimes I feel like I've betrayed my ancestors in a small way by moving back to Europe and having children here. So many of them made the difficult journey for a new life in America with no hope of going back. Would they have thought that 250 years later one of their ancestors would move back?

My nan was best friends with Daley Thompson's mum. They met in Holloway!

One day my grandfather caught Eric Morecambe (as a very young boy) stealing an apple from his corner shop.

henny, I like to think that they would have felt proud that their going to that strange, huge new world had contributed to giving their descendants social/financial mobility! And proud of those descendants for giving themselves the chance to make their lives where they chose. They might also be pleased that you'd returned to the ancestral land.

I remember going through a box of photos and there was a photo of a lovely young woman (but not my grandma ) with an address in Glasgow on the back of it.

I asked my grandad who she was: oh someone I met during the war, he said. The old beggar!

I was always curious about her, how they met, what was said, etc. Nice to think people used to give each other photos with their contact details, so different to fbook shite of today.

My Nan's cousin played Joey 'The Lips' Fagin's mum in The Commitments.

My grandmother was very secretive about huge chunks of her life and she took those secrets to the grave. Her father either died or left her mother with 6 children. She went on to remarry but on condition that she got rid of the kids. She and her siblings were dumped in an orphanage and my great grandmother went on to have 6 more kids with the new husband.
I know that she was spilt up from her siblings and never adopted. She claimed to have married a bigamist but there’s no evidence of any marriage and both my mother and uncles birth certificates have different names for the father. My gm put my mum and uncle into care so she could go to Jamaica with her boyfriend for 3 months. She had to put them back into care after he beat her so badly she lost the baby she was carrying and her womb too. She said she had to fight tooth and nail to get them back after that period of care. My dm and dgm had a rather fractured relationship because of that.

My paternal gm was a proper north London woman. Married her husband and had 4 dc. He left and she got together with my ddads dad and had 4 more. After taken offence to something in a local pub she was told she had the best right hook the public an had ever seen, which she was quite proud of ‘as she was left handed’

I don’t know anything about my maternal gf but my paternal gf was an unremarkable man prone to domestic violence and a bit of an all round scumbag

@listsandbudgets

I know I started this thread so its rather egotistical but is there a way to gets Mumsnet to move it somewhere other than chat? I just feel as if our amazing grandparents deserve better than to have our memories of them disappear in a few months time.

Hi @listsandbudgets,

You'll be glad to hear that we've had quite a few nominations for this thread to be moved over to our Mumsnet Classics topic. We're moving it now - it's a really special thread, thanks so much for starting it.

I've really enjoyed reading these stories.

But it does make me wonder......what stories about us will our grandchildren be posting in 50 years?

I have so enjoyed reading this thread, I am very late to the game but will add my gps.
Maternal gf had half a thumb, was a slate splitter in the Welsh quarries and lost it in an accident at work. My gm worked in the cotton mills of Manchester as a young girl. She obviously had a bad time as she wouldn't talk about it much, remembering a lot of her co-workers as "rough". She never had a bad word to say about anyone and so it must have been a hard time of her life.
Paternal gm died young, and her husband, my gf, married again very quickly. He was a lay preacher who used to speak in tongues in the parishes of North London. They both died before I was born.

My grandfather was awarded the DCM at age 22 during the first world war. What is more interesting to me is that my gg grandmother was known by at least five different last names during her life and she went to prisons for a month because her husband beat her up so she left him but took a knife and fork and some of her dresses. She was charged with theft from her husband. I think she was some kind of v brave to walk out in the 1900s

Blackbelt
I know a pair of mirror twins, one has most of her organs on the opposite side to her sister, so they mirror reach other. Was your gm a twin?

@Fredathetortoise
I’ve met JBB - amazing women. I bet she remembers him!

My paternal grandma lived in a farm cottage and walked three miles each way to and from school every day from the age of 5.
My paternal grandfather was a prisoner of war in WW2 at one of the Stalag camps and never forgave my four year old dad for not recognising him when he eventually got home after three years away
My maternal grandfather used to carry/ wheel my bike two miles to meet me from school once a week so I could ride it back to their house for tea!
My material grandmother came from a very poor family but won a scholarship to a grammar school - she couldn't accept it as her mum died and she had to keep house and raise her siblings.
My maternal great aunt never married or had children was a sergeant in WW2 working on the guns.
Both she and my nan were quite "proper" but used to love giggling at rude greetings cards

In the 1940ies my grandma worked in a warehouse.
Whenever a customer left without having made a purchase the owner of the warehouse would come over to her and the other shop assistants and angrily accuse them of "not having served those customers properly".

My grandad was born in 1914 to a bigamously married couple with 13 children in a 2 up 2 down 'back to back' house in Salford near the Ship Canal.
The toilet was in a shared block down the road.
2 siblings died as infants.

His father was an ex-army stevedore on the docks. He drank heavily and beat his wife every Friday night. He was also a bare knuckle boxer. His fathers 1 good outfit was pawned every week.

My grandad was accepted for Grammar school in 1925 but couldn't go as his family couldn't afford shoes let alone the uniform.
He left school at 13 to work on a grocer's cart which also meant he got free vegetables which was a big deal as he only ate 1 meal s day. But he got caught for truancy & sent back to school until his 14th birthday.

He was a member of Salford Boys Club & got taken to the seaside by them for the first time, at Morecombe I think.
He learned to swim with friends in the Ship Canal but stopped when his best mate drowned.

His father beat his mother once too often & got beaten & made to leave the house by his older half brother Bill. His father went into lodgings & died soon after as did his mother, leaving the adult children to care for the younger children.
My Grandad's sister Lily was 'crippled' in her leg & my Grandad had to protect her from other children.

Grandad started work at the Dunlop Rubber Company in Manchester aged 14 as an office boy.
The women making condoms in the basement used to make fun of him.
He then worked on the main factory floor as it paid better. He liked to use his money to get drunk at Yates' in Manchester on a Saturday night & get in a fight.
But a colleague got both his hands cut off on the machine next to my grandad so it scared him & he left work.

He was then homeless for a year aged 19 & was paid by the Communists to beat up Moseley's Fascist Blackshirts & break up their meetings.
He joined the Army in 1933 & finally had a steady roof over his head & 3 meals a day for the first time in his life.
Ww2 is another story...

Grandad worked on the great panjandrum in WW2 and is in the recording where it goes dangerously off course. His dog is the one running away.

Other Grandad was in Africa and the forgotten landings in Italy. We only found out when my brother took some holiday photos and he said “my friend is buried in Florence”. The scar on his neck was from a bullet.

My tiny granny took exception to my mums nasty teacher caning her on the hand because she was left handed. She put on her leopard print fur coat and walked into the classroom and threatened him with the cane if he did it again.

My other granny was the daughter of one of the first working class MPs in the 1920s. For my dads autograph book she cut the signatures off some of his letters, essentially butchering correspondence from Ramsey MacDonald and Lord Stamfordon amongst others.

My Maternal Grandfather was born in 1923 and lived in the Rhondda Valleys. He didn't go underground as a coalminer like his dad and brothers, but drove lorries instead. When WW2 started he joined up as an ambulance driver in Germany, where he met his wife. Mam says he never talked of his experiences out there and he must have seen some things. He met his wife and they both moved here. His parents hated my grandmother as she was German, so he went NC with them (extraordinary thing to do). He didn't even go to their funerals. He spoke fluent German as a result of his time out there.

My Maternal Grandmother was born in West Germany, not sure of the year. During WW2, she and her family opposed the Nazis and refused to work in the munitions factory (that's what I've been told anyway, I do wonder if there's more to that story). The gestapo came looking for them, and they hid in the cellar through a trapdoor hidden underneath the kitchen table. She met my granddad, they stayed in Germany for a while after the war and had my uncle, moved back over in the early 1950s. She was one of seven girls, and all married different nationalities - one was Welsh, one American, one Yugoslavian, one from Belgium, I can't remember the others.

My Paternal Grandmother I've not heard so much about. I do know that she and her best friend used to run the local club that took local children away for a day at the seaside each year.

My Paternal Grandfather was from Birmingham, and moved to Wales in WW2 as a Bevan boy where he met my grandmother. Despite hating Coal Mining, he continued working there after the war because there wasn't much else going. He eventually left for factory work, but returned to coal mining in his early 40s due to a redundancy. He died young, aged 47, and my dad (the eldest of three) was only 15 at the time.

Unfortunately, my grandparents all passed on before I was born. I do wish sometimes they had been around as I have so many questions, especially for the ones of my mum's side

My grandad was in the navy and survived 6 shipwrecks during WW2. (suspicious if you ask me).

My Grandma was born in the early 1900s. She originally never had to take her driving test. After having my Uncle in the mid 1930s she had to take her test. She did this on the same day as two of my Grandad's tractor drivers. They both failed Nd Grandma passed. Grandad was furious. Grandma continued to drive till shortly before she died aged 95.
Grandad was meant to be on the jury for Wallis Simpsons divorce case when it was heard at Ipswich. He got off jury service by saying it was harvest time. Grandma was furious as she missed hearing all the gossip!!!

My paternal grandfather was exempted from WW2 because he had had rickets.
He worked in a cigarette factory & supplemented his income by making & selling wooden toys.

My maternal grandmother worked in a Nottingham clothing factory - she was very skilled & made fancy lingerie.

Unfortunately she had to have her dominant index finer amputated, after running the machine needle into it by accident & it then became infected.