Two Centuries of Historical Memory? December 11, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Modern , trackback
In the 1980s Beach read an article on Ronald Reagan that described the then President (born in 1911) talking to veterans of Gettysburg as a child. It was a spark on kindling for the historic imagination. Here is a striking nineteenth-century equivalent that has given Beach much pleasure today. It was recorded in 1851 in the Worc Chronicle (18 Jun, apparently taken from Notes and Queries).
ln the year 1844 died James Horrocks, a small farmer, who lived at Harwood, a short distance from Bolton, in Lancashire, having completed his hundredth year. This circumstance, however, was not so remarkable as that of his own birth; his father, William Horrocks, having been born in 1657 one year before the death of Oliver Cromwell, and having married in 1741, at the advanced age of 84, a second wife, a young and buxom woman of 26, by whom he had one child, the above-named James Horrocks, born March 14th, 1744, and baptized at Bradshaw Chapel, near Bolton.
The trick is evidently to be the son of a man who was already very old at marriage and then, in turn, to live a long time: as genetics is an important, if not the most important factor in longevity then the two things should go together. This is fun scenario to play around with. There is nothing physically impossible about someone still alive today (2015), being born in 1910 or even 1900. If they had been conceived by a ninety year old father, and if they had had ten years in childhood with their father before his death, historical memory could stretch back into the very early nineteenth century. It would, for example, just be possible for a man or (more likely) a woman to remember TODAY her father talking about the memory of hearing, as an infant, the news of an Allied victory at Waterloo. Crossing the Atlantic the Louisiana Purchase is perhaps out of reach, but the Whitehouse being burnt in 1812 would certainly be recoverable. Any other examples of two generation memories lasting two centuries? Drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com Will there be some exceptional cases of individuals telling their great grandchildren about hearing the news of Kennedy’s death in 2170 or September 11 in 2210?
(Can’t help wondering whether, in a literate society, this extreme generational connection might not define community memory. For Beach Waterloo seems, somehow, ‘present’. Anything before that date seems, meanwhile, completely out of reach, as if the historical imagination falls down into a ravine. Intellectually we all know that Cromwell came after Richard III, but emotively they seem to belong to the same epoch and are not, in the mists, that distant from Charlemagne or Christ.)
22 Dec 2015: John Mc writes ‘When I was a kid, back around 1972-1973, I knew a man born in the 1880s.His grandfather’s grandfather was alive in the 1700s.
He only knew the man through his grandfather’s stories, but it blew my young mind to know someone who knew someone with stories from that far back.
Interesting trivia: The last American Revolutionary war pension payment was in 1906.The woman died at age 92. When she was 21, she married a man who was 75.
the story in a nutshell is here and more:
Thanks, John!
22 Dec 2015, David O: ‘No double-centuries here, but your post on generational memory reminded me of the American Civil War brides. You may know this already, but younger women would sometimes marry civil war veterans for their pensions, resulting in (possibly) the last American Civil War widow dying in… 2008:
And there was one Civil War VA pension still being paid out in 2014, to the daughter of a veteran: http://www.avantecenters.com/about/article/post/Americas-Last-Civil-War-Pension-going-to-Wilkes-native
