Hacker News Reader

Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

My family has really long generations. Going back 7 generations for me patrilinearly is exactly 280 years; 40 years per generation. When I was young my grandparents were already in their 80s and both grandfathers gone before I was 14. Sadly, both had mental decline (stroke, Alzheimers) and I never knew them in their right mind. They'd be in their 110s today. The idea of knowing my great-grandparents, who would be in their 140s-150s today, is basically unthinkable for me.

View on HN

Same.

When my were in school and had friends who were visiting great-grandparents in nursing homes (and in one instance great-great), I had to explain that my great-grandfather was a Civil War veteran, and that I'd only met my grandfather (who worked as a sharecropper alongside freed slaves and the children of freed slaves on my great-grandfather's farm) once. One of those children lived behind us when I was growing up, and if I'd paid better attention when helping him with his garden would have taught me how to plant by the moon and stars --- he did teach me how to gut and skin a squirrel.

feel like it is questionable to describe yourself as a sharecropper if your daddy owns the entire farm

He married one of the daughters --- two different family branches here.

My neighbour is a fifty year old guy and his grandfather was born in the 1860's. Both the grandfather and father had kids with much younger women. Funny how we're closer to the past than we think.

John Tyler was born on March 29, 1790 and served as the 10th President of the USA from 1841-1845.

His Grandson, Harrison Ruffin Tyler (Born November 9, 1928), is still alive today.

According to Wikipedia, John died in 1862 and Harrison was born in 1928. So he never met his grandfather.

It makes me wonder - who is the oldest "directly-known" person? Maybe there's a better term for this. What I mean is, of all of the currently-living people, who is the person that one of them actually met who was born the earliest?

If you think about it, there are about a couple of hundred super-centenarians (110 or older) alive[1]. Surely at least one of them met a very old relative when they were young - for example, when I was 9, I met a great uncle who was 100 years old. Taking into account life expectancy, if you assume at least one of them has met someone 85 years older than them, that means this oldest "directly known person" would have been born at least 195 years ago (1829). Which means there’s a good chance someone alive has met someone born in the 1820’s.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercentenarian#Incidence

> Maybe there's a better term for this.

Seems to be the rule used in Coco.

> Funny how we're closer to the past than we think.

I really love this recording[0] from 1941 of a photographer born in 1843, talking about the American West. It's one of Youtube's many gems.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2ab5nv4Suc (video)

There's also this video interview of Bertrand Russell, whose grandfather met Napoleon as a young member of Parliament.

https://youtu.be/4OXtO92x5KA

My grandpa's mother worked as a servant in a castle that I only know as a burned-out ruin and my grandpa fought in Stalingrad as a teenager. Unfathomable

In the line I've been able (most just showed up in the New World from somewhere or other...) to trace back to 7 generations, it was a little less, but they were in the colonies before the US was a thing, so more than 35, less than 40 years per generation?

My wife can go back 7 as well, and her family has also tended towards high parental investment in offspring; next time I'm in the cellar I'll have to check but I'd easily believe they'd also be on the longer side.

(NB. age matching is a post-WWI thing. I believe the pre-WWI ideal was mid-30's men* marrying early-20's women, which seems to have been inherited from Aristotle's recommendation for 30 year olds to marry 15 year olds)

* Stefan Zweig has a chapter on how this gap influenced porn in the Austro-Hungarian Empire — not that anyone in this august assemblage might wonder how the Viennese equivalent of OnlyFans worked.

I do get frustrated when I hear people saying negative or unfounded things about couples with relatively small age gaps 7-15 years. It’s the norm, not the exception.

And I say that as someone who has only dated people my own age.

Many things were historical norms, with current practices being the exception.

see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39851970

I am shocked, shocked that Josephine Mutzenbacher didn’t reflect reality

Wait, given the age differences described here, the book very much reflected reality, no?

No, what I took away from Zweig is that 19 yo men were very much interested in 19 yo women, but (although some were for rent) they couldn't successfully date them due to competition from men "of substance".

EDIT: hmm, was it really a change in mores, or did WWI just kill off enough 20-40 yos to reset this dynamic?

Isn't that how it was in the Mutzenbacher as well? I mostly recall her having sex with much older men even before she enters prostitution

I wonder how much this change was due to the modern idea of romantic love taking over rather than older men becoming unavailable

Good question! It's on my slush list, but atm I have a lot of physical things which need to be rearranged at or near the surface of the earth, so unlikely I'll dig into this before it's slid well out of HN's attention span.

> in the Mutzenbacher

Familienname, eh? I've yet to read her, but given her reputation I'm glad that makes at least two of us who are not already per Du.

(it turns out my wife's family took more generations to get back into the XVIII, so that line runs ~30 years per generation)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com