Today my brothers friend posted on facebook that she "made it to tomorrow " because she is traveling to New Zealand. That got me thinking... if you move across so many time zones like that and never return you are actually not a year older on your birthday because you skipped a day. And vice versa coming here. They are actually a year older the day before their birthday. I shared this thought with my mom and she pointed out that people during WWII lost whole years because they lied about their age to get into the service. She continues to tell me that they never actually knew how old my grandpop was when he died because of that. What!? You think someone would have mentioned this when I was researching my family tree last year. Here I was finding clues about 5th and 6th generation when there was a better mystery much closer to the trunk of this family tree. So I set out today to find some answers.
My mom said that when my grandfather died she thought he was 68. So did her mother and brother. My grandfather's brother though thought he was 70. This makes no sense to me because you would assume his brother would know the real (younger) age and the family would know the post war (older/ lied about) age. Thats backwards though. I cant use any military data because that can be wrong so I decided to check the census for some clarification. My grandpop died in Jan of 91. He was born in Oct. My mom thinks he was born in 1922. Her uncle thought 1920. The 1930 census was taken in April and it said that at his last birthday he was 8. Which would mean he turned 8 in Oct of 1929. Which would mean he was 69 when he died.
Not only did that not help but it actually served to further confuse the mystery. If anyone has any suggestions on how I can solve this, please let me know.
No comments:
Post a Comment