[This is an older post I am republishing].
I was working on a document about government goals for 2035, and wondered if I would still be alive. When I was younger, I realised I would be in my late thirties when it became (gasp!) 2000. I wondered then if I would make it because that was so OLD! Nowadays ‘Y2K’ fashion is retro.
My grandfather was born in 1899, my mother in 1928. It’s strange how we don’t generally know anything about our grandparents’ parents or grandparents. Our ancestors from the 1700s and earlier are lost in the mists of time unless they are famous. It’s got to the point that I don’t take making it to the end of the present year for granted, yet these widows survived into the 21st from the American civil war (1861 – 1865)
Given that the American Civil War was fought between 1861 and 1865, it seems impossible that the last civil war widow died at the end of 2020. There were a number of civil war widows who have died recently, but Helen Viola Jackson was the last.
How could that be, you ask? Simply put, the Civil War veterans were very old (in their nineties), and their brides were very young (still teenagers). Still, the mind boggles!
Here is some more information on the longest surviving Civil War Widows.
