Reply #30: My Grandmother (b.1890) gave me her girlhood coin collection.

[NNadir]

I don't believe I own anything older.

I have my grandfather's picture with his brothers when they were all in the British Army in the First World War. My grandfather was some kind of military hero. Strangely enough, I know very little else about my grandfather as the war (and genetics) rendered him a terrible alcoholic who was widely despised by nearly everyone who knew him. The only exception was the aforementioned grandmother who, for reasons most people found mysterious, loved him until the day she died, almost 50 years after he was murdered in a bar.

He died well before I born. I never met him. When I asked about him, most people, my father included, refused to discuss him except in terms to wonder how such a waste of humanity came to pass. Sometimes I think my suspicions about who he might have been, more than any single thing, caused me to grow up to be a pacifist.