Yup, it's living memory. When people are still alive to tell the story.
My late maternal grandmother, born 1908, would tell us kids about tales about her grandfather, who lived 1830-1929. To me he's only just out of living memory.
My dad's cousins were a generation younger than him so - my age. (Their dad married and had kids late in life. Whereas his brother, my grandad, had dad in his early 20s). And I found it fascinating when dad's cousin sent me family photos I'd never seen - all Edwardian era - of her grandad (my great grandad) as she's the same age as me but there are her grandparents, in straw boaters and my great grandma in full Edwardian dress - but for my second cousin, those long lost Edwardians who died in the 1930s long before we were both born, are her grandma and grandad... I think she's about exactly my age. Til we made contact with eachother, I'd only had one photo of my great grandparents - she had some great ones, now all copied and sent to me.
My mum was born in the 1920s and used to talk of "uncles" who were in the 1830s' cholera pit (mass grave) behind Selby Abbey. My mum died in the early 1970s. In recent years, I did genealogy, and was curious to see what the truth was. In fact there were direct line ancestors at the right date in Selby - but no-one died of cholera. However, in this parish where I now live, not far away, there is a grave with 11 bodies in - people who died in an accident on the river here in 1833. I'm related to several of them by marriage and my great uncle x 3 was one of the three survivors. In 1833, it was a national story in the newspapers. Over the years I'm guessing that story had been distorted to a few miles down the road, shifted a year or so earlier and was re-located in a cholera pit. Rather than a survivor of an incident who
wasn't in the mass grave, it had been remembered as a victim who was ina. different mass grave just a few miles away.
Perfect illustration of how a story distorts, over time. There were elements of truth in it but wrong catastrophe, wrong location, and our relative survived, wasn't in the mass grave. Still impressive to think some of the story had survived from 1833 to the 1930s when my mum will have heard it, as a child.
When we moved here, the first thing I spotted in that churchyard was the big gravestone for the 11 drowning victims and when I first saw it from a distance, assumed it was a factory accident or similar. It was a few years later that I discovered I had a connection to it but was drawn to researching it and so knew the details of the 1833 accident a few years before I realised, when finding my great grandmother x 4's surname one day, my relative had been one of the three survivors. His evidence was the most comprehensive given at the inquest because the other two survivors were still too traumatised/ill to give evidence so I'd been reading my great uncle x 3's words at the inquest without realising he was my relative...
ETA" My great uncle x 3 lived to be a very old man. As did both the other survivors. The other two are now buried in the village churchyard, near the shared grave of the 11 who died that night. My great uncle ended up also in a public grave - but in York, where he died in the workhouse, in his 80s. He is the only one of the 14 in the river that night, to never make it home to this parish, in the end. (When I moved here, had no idea my mum's ancestors had lived here for over 200 years).
