#doing a project right now about the triangle shirtwaist factory fire and oof

[clove-pinks]

An interesting piece of trivia in Donald R. Hickey's book The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict: the last US veteran died in 1905, nearly a century after the conflict ended, and the last US pensioner (a daughter of a War of 1812 veteran) died in 1946. A child of a War of 1812 veteran was alive after the Second World War! It reminded me of the time a granddaughter of an American Revolutionary War veteran appeared on a 1961 television programme.

The last surviving child of an American Civil War veteran died in 2020, aged 90—child, not grandchild. I looked up the last living child of an enslaved Black American, because I know one was alive into the 2020s—Daniel Smith died only last month, in October 2022!

There is just something about having these seemingly distant eras so closely connected to living memory that feels eerie. Considering that we know that trauma can be passed on through epigenetic changes—documented in descendants of Union prisoners of war in the American Civil War—how far removed are we from the pain of our ancestors?