Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Did You Or Your Children Know Their Great-Grandparents?

I'm going to broaden the scope of this week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun question from Randy Seaver so I can have a more interesting post.

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music) is:

(1) Did you or your children know their great-grandparents?  

(2) Tell us in your own blog post, in comments to this post, or in comments on Facebook.  As always, please leave a link to your work in Comments.

As I've mentioned before, I have no biological children of my own, so if I restricted this question to exactly as asked, it would be a really short post.  Therefore I'm going to expand it a little.

First, neither I nor my siblings knew any of our great-grandparents.  The closest any of us came is the story that I was told not only by my mother but also by my father, that my mother flew with me to Florida when I was but a babe in arms so that her grandmother — my great-grandmother, Sarah Libby (Brainin) Gordon — could see me.  Unfortunately, there is no proof of this visit that I have yet found, even though my grandfather routinely took all sorts of family photos.  How he missed the opportunity to get four generatiosn of women together in one photo is beyond me.  One of these days (soon, obviously) I need to ask some of my cousins on that side of the family, who still live in the Miami area, if they remember this momentous visit.  Anyway, as it stands, it's a story with no documentation.

The only other great-grandparent who survived to when my two siblings and I were alive was my father's paternal grandmother, Laura May (Armstrong) Sellers Ireland, known later in life as Nanny Ireland.  After I began doing family history research, I discovered that Nanny Ireland had lived to 1970.  That was before my family moved to Australia.  We had made some trips back east to visit family, but it was always my mother's family.  My father was not close to his family, so we never visited them.  And that meant we did not meet his grandmother.  When I learned that we had missed that opportunity, I was a little annoyed, but it was way too late to do anything about it at that point.

Keeping this in my generation, I'm not sure if any of my sister's children met a great-grandparent.  The only one who could have would have been her son Garry, who was born in 1983.  My paternal grandfather died in 1985.  Stacy might have brought Garry with her on a trip to Florida, and he might have met Grampa.

But if we take it one additional generation, we have a definite positive.  Stacy's granddaughter, Natalie, absolutely met her great-grandfather — my father.  So by manipulating this challenge just a little (okay, quite a bit), I finally have one positive result!

This photo, from the family reunion/birthday party I coordinated in 2015, includes my father and my grandniece.  My brain seems to be mush at the moment, because I have blanked on how to draw circles around each of them using Photoshop.  My father is on the far left wearing the blue and white shirt.  My stepmother is to his right in the photo, wearing a yellow blouse.  My grandniece is behind her with her back to the camera.  So I have documentation of my story!