14 last April.
My Grandparents married in July of 1934, built their house in 1938, and still lived there when they passed away a few years ago.
But my great-grandmother on my Dad's side has us all beat. When she passed away in 1971 she was three days shy of her hundreth birthday. The house she lived in at the time of her passing was the house she and my great-grandad built just after their first child was born in 1892. For the mathematically challenged that's 78 years. Not only were her 12 kids born there (9 survived birth/childhood), my father was also born there (1940). The house is gone now - it was in pretty bad shape in 1971 and the intervening years didn't help any. Dad says we tore it down to get all the lumber, but I know the truth. He wanted to take it down while it was still in outwardly presentable condition and keep it from becoming just another old fallen-in house.
If any of you are into western poetry, Red Steagall has a poem called "Grandmother's Trunk". Listen carefully and you'll hear him say a line about a blue satin ribbon for the 'Foard County Cotton Queen'. Red and Dad have known each other since college, and still occasionally see each other at ranch-related events. Red wrote the poem after hearing my Father talk about going through all the keepsakes in the trunk great-grandmother kept under her bed.
Brad
