darkoshi: (Default)
Darkoshi ([personal profile] darkoshi) wrote2020-02-02 10:29 pm

voices from the past

The cassette from 1972 still plays fine! I remember now that my mom played me some of it at her house, which is when I asked to borrow it in order to record to my computer. I was able to record & save the audio from both cassettes today by means of a better-working cassette player and Qiao's desktop computer. Now I want to ask my mom if she has any more old family cassettes like that.

48 years ago before I was even born, my relatives' voices still sounded the same as I remember from my childhood. Only one of them, I didn't recognize; her voice was slightly different than I remembered. All the relatives who spoke on that cassette have passed away over the years, except one aunt who is my mom's age

100 years ago, one of my grandmothers hadn't even been born yet. That seems sort of amazing; somehow 100 years doesn't sound so long ago right now. That might be because I was reading about the flu pandemic of 1918. My grandma was born in Boston in 1920. The family tree records I'd downloaded a few years ago show that one of her uncles died in October 1918, of "influenza pneumonia", after being sick for 9 days. Of the other 12 death entries on that page, 8 others were also from influenza and/or pneumonia.