Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!

[surrealestate]

I've been thinking recently about various issues and the assorted ways in which the population with which I spend most of my time nowadays differs from that from my childhood and adolescence. Though it also made me realize that in many cases, I have no idea one way or the other, beyond the default assumptions, which seem to be very different where I am now from where I grew up.

So, a poll!

Note the use of "raised" rather than "born". And you can decide for yourself where the line is between "raised" and "adult" if it applies to you. For the language question, I know some people may have multiple "first" languages, so I tried to clarify what I meant. [ETA on Q1: Your parents, grandparents, etc, all count as part of your lineage. As per the wording, your answer should refer to the one that goes furthest back, not the most recent.]

[Poll #1346353]

(One thing I hate about LJ polls is how they expand in vertical space after you answer them. I wish they didn't do that. Or didn't show the response stats until you hit the "expand" or something.)

Comments

[koshmom.livejournal.com]

Gah! I have a boring heritage. My parents got married and had all their children together, i.e. no divorce, no out of wedlock kids, they lived together their entire married lives. All 4 of my grandparents got married and had all their children together (no "broken families", all aunts/uncles had same mom and dad), no known out of wedlock kids. All 4 grandparents came from eastern europe (polish on one side, Russian on other). All 4 grandparents came to america nearish 1900-1910 or so-ish, when they were older teens or early 20's or so in age. All married in the USA. I always thought my background was "normal", yet now I realize that while I had the cultural "normal" family it was nowhere near the norm!

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

As far as I'm aware, all the marriages in my lineage lasted til death, but I'm not sure how to assume anything about anyone else's based on this poll. :)

[koshmom.livejournal.com]

I'm not assuming anything about anyone else's based on this poll, I'm assuming that since in the world today there's a LOT of out of wedlock kids, and a LOT of divorces, and even divorces in my family now (an uncle was first in the 1960's, but a few 1st cousins got divorced. No known out of wedlock kids in immediate family, but my brother has a "complex situation" regarding his divorced partner. Heck, in the not so distant past there were many remarriages when a spouse died young (and 2 of my aunts died young, those uncles remarried later in life, but no children were in the picture). So I'm looking at my "normal" family as the Cultural norm, but my growing-up family could not have by any stretch have been in the "greater than 50% of families are like mine" even back then.

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

I can't recall very many divorced parents among my childhood classmates, though of the ones I can think of, none were immigrants or first-gen. When I moved to areas that were American further back, I also found there were more divorces. There may or may not be any real correlation there.

[koshmom.livejournal.com]

Thinking back, I had 2 childhood chums who had an alive father who wasn't living with them (at least one was bona-fide divorce, another I have no idea since the topic either never came up, or it didn't matter enough to me to remember it). I lost touch with one girl (I think we had a falling out, and her family moved) but the other girl is the one that told me that you were only fertile, and could only get pregnant, during one 24 hour period during a month. This she told me when she was in 8th grade, dating a 12th grade boy. Yes, she got pregnant by the time she was in 10th grade, if not earlier.

Actually, I thought it was weirder to live by renting a home than to live without a parent. And to live in an actual multifamily home (apartment or duplex) was the height of strangeness! My thought was How Can You Live somewhere and NOT KNOW EVERYONE who lives "with you"???