I’m finally up-to-date with the 52 Ancestors prompts. Woohoo! I’ll celebrate this minor success while it lasts. 🙂
This week’s topic is longevity.
I happen to a lot of longevity to celebrate in my family. My very first understanding of the concept of being “old” when I was a kid came from growing up with a great grandmother nearby. My great aunt and grandparents weren’t old, not when More Grannies was still peeling tatties for supper and watching her “program” (soap opera) and was sharp as a tack. I still can’t think of anyone shy of 90 as old, really.
Isabella Mackenzie née McLean was the 6th of my 2x great grandparents’ ten children about whom I posted earlier in this challenge. She was born in Minneapolis and returned with her widowed mother to the Scottish Highlands when she was just four years old. That wasn’t the end of her international adventures. When she was 70, she immigrated to Canada with her daughters and their families, including my mum, who was then ten years old.
More Grannies, as she was known to my sister and me, Granny to just about everyone else who knew her, was the sort of person always more interested in looking forward than back. It’s one of the great regrets of my life that we could never get her to tell us very many stories about her life because she would rather hear about what we were up to.
She died in December, 1987, just 19 days shy of her 100th birthday, so close that she’d already received a birthday letter from the queen to mark the occasion. We miss her still.