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

My Grandad worked in Intelligence during World War 2. He was a fluent speaker of German.
To this day I have no idea what he did as he and my Nanny took the Official Secrets Act very seriously and never told a soul exactly what he did. They took it to their graves.

These are all so lovely, but this one is my favourite

My Grannie had very bad asthma. She loved dancing but was too breathless to walk home afterwards. So my Grandad would carry her all the way home after the dance every Friday night.

My paternal grandfater was at Gallipoli with the NZ Army and was wounded twice.

When he got home to NZ he discovered his mother had sent his father to an insane asylum after he went overseas. He went and got his father out and they all just kept living together and no more was said about it.

My paternal grandfather was jailed for armed robbery and also once shot at my grandmother. And was an alcoholic.

My grandmother was a bigamist. She married my grandad a couple of years before her husband died.
Also she used false names on her marriage certificate, and claimed she’d been born in South Africa despite her twin sister being born in Scotland! She was quite a piece of work.

My dad's das was a fisherman (east coast fishing town) and at age 12, as the cabin lad, was the only survivor of a fishing boat wreck.

Sadly I know this story secondhand as he died before I was born.

@Witchend what, the Apollo LEM Flying Bedstead? The one that Neil Armstrong had to bail out of?!

My Grandad won the Pools jackpot in the 60s, enough to have a brand new house built and buy a brand new car. Before that he lived in a little caravan with my nan, their son and my Mum.

Be like winning a Lotto Jackpot today.

My grandmother was a Titanic survivor.

@Flisspaps no, the first vertical take off plane made by Rolls Royce.
Flying Bedstead

He was test pilot at Rolls Royce and I believe only about half a dozen people flew it. I'm not sure if that includes the person who crashed it and shouldn't have been trying to either...

My dads mum got pregnant with my dad by a Canadian airman and to avoid the shame of her being an unmarried mum (airman was killed in the war) she had to pretend he was her much younger brother and he was raised by grandparents - who by all accounts were hideous to him- even though my dad kind of knew by his late teens it was kept a secret till her funeral ...the only happy part of this is since then my dad has made very good connections with his half siblings who until my grandmother's funeral thought he was their uncle

My grandmother had the same name as one of her sisters, because her father was so drunk when registering the birth.

My Grandma was the first woman to go to university in her county.

My Grandpa Bill was strafed by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. He was in high school and had gone surfing at a beach on the military base with a friend whose dad was an officer there.

Saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary before being rescued from the sea in WW2

My grandfather designed themepark rides.
He retired recently in his late 70s.

I had a full set of biological grandparents until I was 33.

My family keep tight generation gaps. The DC's maternal great grandparents are younger than their paternal grandma.

My grandad was arrested on his wedding day in Ireland. He was drunk and disorderly

My granddad knew Mick Jagger's Dad.

My grandad was a train driver and one of 'his' trains is in the National Railway Museum in York.

Back in the 1940s my grandparents had a housekeeper. She never went outside the door except to church with the family on a Sunday. She 'mysteriously' became pregnant and the child was put up for adoption. I'm 99.99% sure that my grandfather was the baby's father.

The same grandfather sexually assaulted my cousin when she was 16. It was all swept under the carpet and never mentioned again.
He died about 20 years ago.
He was an evil fucking bastardy.

My own father isn't much better. I'm fairly sure that I have a half sibling out there somewhere who's about 8 years younger than me. I just can't prove it.

My grandfather attended the movie premiere of Gone With the Wind in Atlanta and the ball held the night before.

My maternal grandfather spent much of his life ashamed as his own Dad had committed suicide after GGN informed him she was pregnant - with number 19 (aka my maternal grandfather). The farm wasn’t making enough money to feed the kids they already had, so another one was the final straw.
My paternal great grandmother was delightfully crazy. She, my uncle and my nana were in the concentration camps, and after release, she lied on her forms abou her age so they could move to Australia. We are not quite sure how much she knocked off, but we think it could be 13 years as otherwise she had her first child at age 3 . She only passed away in 2011, and was the first person to get me tipsy.
My paternal nana was sleeping beauty in a castle within a theme park.
My maternal nana never held a drivers licence... which we discovered after she rear-ended a bus at 78, and her neighbour the local police sergeant attended the accident and asked her for her licence. She thought licences were an attempt to control people by the government

I went to the same art college as my nana but didn't realise it TIL after she died

3 of my grandparents were conceived out of wedlock.

My grandma’s Mum was the youngest of 17. Her dad was one of 22.

My Grandfather was born 133 years before my daughter.