What jobs did/do your grandparents do?

My grandmother was mostly a housewife, in the '70s owned a ceramic shop that burned down in '79 (note - my grandfather just found out last week that she was the one who torched it for the insurance money). Spent the '80s and '90s teaching ceramics classes at home, selling jewelry at flea markets, running insurance scams on occasion.

My grandfather was a sheetrocker in California after WWII, I guess he eventually ran his own small company. When my father went to college in the late '60s, he and my grandmother moved to Las Vegas and then Iowa, helping start an RV company that would eventually become Winnebago (in a roundabout way, after the original corp had folded). In '71, he and my father moved to Texas, where they worked construction for a while, started Southern States Roofing in '74, and kept that up doing commercial roofing until the last big hail storm at the beginning of the '90s. Now the business is mostly commercial remodelling and one or two homes every year for the commercial clients, mostly contracting. A total of four direct employees, the two of them, an old hippie and on occasion, me. Turned 80 this spring, still works every day.

On my mom's side:
My grandmother worked at the Post Office for 30 years, retired in 1990, gets a $24k/year pension, plus some social security. I wish Civil Service was still around.

My grandfather, uh, I don't really know. He passed away in 1989, had his first bypass in '75 and retired soon after. Had worked in factories and in ranching before that, I think. Mostly raised chickens and took them to shows when I was alive.

Paternal grandmother: Never had a job, too busy having 13 children.

Matenal grandfather: Gardener, farmhand, prisoner of war.

Maternal grandmother: Long-running chain of various village shop jobs. May have worked as a butcher's assistant at one point, I can't remember.

My father's mother worked for what has become Verizon as a telephone operator.

My mother's father was a merchant seaman who jumped ship to come to America. He then became a fireman and construction worker.

My mother's mother was a seamstress in a factory in NYC.

My maternal grandfather was a banker, the latest (last, actually, I think) in a long line of them; my maternal grandmother was a receptionist for the same company for something like fifty years. The first and only job she had, I believe. (I can't even imagine living in the same town for fifty years, much less working for the same company.)

Maternal Grandfather - Engineer

I am not sure what either of my grandmothers were employed as.

My maternal grandparents met while working at the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. My grandma quit to raise her children and then fucked up her leg which made her semi-immobile and unable to work for the most part.

My paternal grandfather was a bus driver and streetcar engineer. Nana didn't work as far as I know.

Maternal grandfather was some kind of gambler/entrepreneur.

Paternal grandmother was a housewife.

Paternal grandfather used to own a large clothing factory but lost it all when he went to trial for dipping quite extensively into his employees' insurance funds.

Maternal grandma was a high school teacher. She was a good teacher but she could be mean, I've heard.

Paternal grandpa is buried in Vegas. He's not spoken of much and I have no idea what his profession may have been, if he had one.

Paternal grandma is still hanging on, she worked in a doctor's office most of her life to support 5 boys and is now retired.

maternal grandfather - took over the family farm when he was 17 and his dad died, but then joined the army for WWII, was a POW, came home and started working for GM, first on the floor, later as a tool & die maker. UAW.

paternal grandmother - cashier/stocker in a five & dime forever, including while raising five boys; more or less sole wage-earner.

paternal grandfather - not much I think; he was in the military for the war but is an alcoholic so couldn't keep real jobs for too long. I remember my dad saying he would do loadout for bands when they played at the university, including KISS!

They are all still alive and I should visit them more of course.

My paternal grandmother (the egg donor): A cleaning lady and serial marrier (*bitter laughs*).
My paternal "grandmother" (the one who raised Dad): Retired.
My paternal grandfather (the sperm donor): Was a career Army man (fought in Korea, IIRC); died of a heart attack while serving overseas during peacetime.

merchant seaman/fulltime parent

My mother's parents were both dead by the time I was born. I've only seen a couple of photos of them. They had three daughters and two sons, and ran their own farm - until the red plague was imported into Estonia in the early '40s. After the war, my mother's mother managed to keep their house and some o thef land and give a decent education to her children. Except for the eldest son who, still in his teens, had to take over as the master of the house then.
As a small kid, I spent many summers at that place. And a very beautiful place it was. (Still is. Sold years ago now.)

my other two grandparents ran a small mom&pop store in a bad immigrant neighborhood in philadelphia, forcing their children off to college at 16 in the hopes that they'd find nice jewish wives. they died very young.

The glass ears industry, yes?

On my mother's side my grandfather ran away from home at age 16 and eventually became a tenured professor of English and American literature, while my grandmother was a faculty wife who raised two children (before marrying she worked in an insurance office as a clerk.)

maternal side
real g-father: mother never knew him although a pic exists of him looking like gene vincent on a motorcyle
step-father: carpenter
g-mother: licensed vocational nurse (not rn)

My ancestors: growing food and fighting Italian occupation to serve you better.

both PgF's family and MgF's family were wine merchants, apparently with some ties to some of the big Port and Madeira merchants (in Porto and Funchal, Portugal, duh). one uncle fought in the RAF during WWII, another was in the Royal Navy -- both have some really interesting stories.

(oh and N. if my mom's Jesus does that mean I can't be Mary Magdelene?)

My mother's parents were both botanists, and university professors. Actually, my grandfather ended up Vice Chancellor of the University of Singapore, and my grandmother was head of the Botany Department of the University of Natal.

It gets posher a generation back. A Doctor, A Minister, An Adventurer, A Town Mayor, and "nothing, they were just rich".

(How the heck am I supposed to live up to that? But at least it's not as strange as HSA's family which is full of poets, publishers and cookery writers.)

My mother's father owned and ran a pharmacists in Acton (it's still a chemist's today) and my mother's mother was a house wife.

Maternal grandfather: went on WPA projects during the Depression, became hardware store owner, wound up with group of friends in commercial property cartel and at one time owned the land that became Mall of America. Oldest of five boys and Always Right, so bossy as hell.
Maternal grandmother: housewife/mental patient. Was sent to art college and secretary school and was sewing/cooking MACHINE until she got loopy (sez my mum).

Found a picture of my dad's father (and that side of the family)

http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2421/3860576983_9f5ab65367_z.jpg

(grandfather at top. grandmother is holding my Uncle Ben. My dad is on the bottom-left. This picture was taken in 1919 when my dad was 4 years old). Both of my dad's parents had passed away long before I was born.

What's cool is that botanists are still referencing my grandfather's work even a 100 years later... Every so often I'll search and find a reference to his work on potato diseases or bean anthracnose. My favorite title of all of his books is "Observations On The Pathological Morphology Of Stinking Smut Of Wheat."

That's a great photo!

paternal gf was a bridgeworker (spans, not teeth) -- and a WWI veteran

Observations On The Pathological Morphology Of Stinking Smut Of Wheat
This could be a NWW album

Paternal grandfather: owned a bar
Paternal grandmother: homemaker

Maternal grandfather: psychologist
Maternal grandmother: psychologist (both for the military/government)

Want to say one generation before that everyone washed clothes.

dug up more pics from that photo shoot + another one

mmmm foods
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7278/7417618212_dd0fcdaa78_c.jpg

dining room
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7259/7417617946_ab23bcf279_c.jpg

on the beach
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7114/7417618348_db75cd32ac_z.jpg

Those are dreamy!

Grandma made Grandpa sit on the floor?
What does he have behind his back?
http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5465/7417618044_ac7391676c.jpg

grandfathers: chemist, mechanic
grandmothers: typist, secretary

secretary gm had the second highest grades/entrance exam score in the province when she applied to med school but was denied because of sexism

these old pictures are fantastic. wish i had access to some of my own here. pls keep them coming

paternal grandfather: farmer, wwII marine
paternal grandmother: odd jobs here and there, not sure

maternal grandfather: owned the local shoe store. sold some real estate?
maternal grandmother: stay at home mom until the kids were grown up. got a job as a secretary and worked her way up to vice president (briefly) of #&R B10ck

Paternal Grandfather: Quantity Surveyor, rugby internationalist (when it was an amateur game)
Paternal Grandmother: Old Money Edinburgh Matriarch
Maternal Grandfather: Merchant seaman (lots of stories about Cuban brothels), crofter
Maternal Grandmother: District nurse (there is an entire generation of people in the village that she delivered).

My grandfather (the banker) would never talk about his time in WWII, either. I heard one pretty gruesome second-hand story from my grandmother about being stuck in an enclosed space with some dead bodies for longer than one might prefer, and my mom took him to see Saving Private Ryan and he cried in the theater, and that's all I knew.

When I was proof reading his eulogy that my mom wrote, I learned he had been in the 1st Infantry Division, landed on Omaha Beach, and earned a Medal of Honor for staying awake for a truly ungodly length of time to non-stop operate a radio. He would never talk about any of it.

Ack thinking about my 70-something grandfather crying while watching Saving Private Ryan after years of silence about the war is making me a little verklempt. Also I miss that guy a lot.

aww man :(

that is super raw, carl

my grandpa talked about WWII a fair amount, but only about his buddies there, the good times they had on the ship between what what probably some horrifying stuff. one of the only photos i'd seen from his WWII days everyone looked grim and awful, except for him, hat crooked and making some silly face at the camera. he liked to show us the shrapnel still in his arm and brag about how he could dive off one end of the ship and swim underneath it to the other side.

pretty gruesome second-hand story from my grandmother about being stuck in an enclosed space w--COVERING MY EARS AND EYES

brag about how he could dive off one end of the ship and swim underneath it to the other side.

I love this.

cool thread!
one grandpa was a pilot for pan-am.
other grandpa was a pediatrician.
i wish i had known them better, they probably had good stories.

my pictured grandma wasn't in any war, but she also refused to talk to me. i think it's just something grandparents do? i would ask questions and questions about the way things were but she just never wanted to tell me anything.

i have a set of photos of the other set of grandparents too, but they are more fraught (and one is still alive) so imma hold off on those

my grandma would talk to us a LOT, but it became clear from an early age that she had kind of soap opera-fied a lot of events. when talking about my dad's first wife, she was always like, "one day she just walked out and no one ever saw her again" and my dad would later tell us that he had lunch with her the week before.

paternal grandfather: farmer in later life but I don't know before that
paternal grandmother: nurse
also they are my father's adoptive parents.
I've known his birth mother for longer than I knew my grandmother, but I still to this day don't know her backstory or how she came to have my Dad. She was related to Dad's adoptive parents, I believe a cousin or something like that, and that Dad's birth father might have been a returned soldier though I have NO idea.

Maternal grandfather: worked in concrete I believe, building local bridges. Had his own business before the war doing this. A lot of them are still standing, which is p cool.
Served in WWII as a driver, was shipped to Singapore and was captured as a POW during the fall. Spent the rest of the war in a POW camp in Burma. Worked on a section of the Burmese railway until he fell ill with Beri Beri and remained in the infirmary til the close of the war. He lived for another 30 years after that but he died right before I was born so I never got to talk to him about any of what he went through. Mum said he never talked about it. but we found out later that he kept a sort of diary of his time in the POW camp, and we have that along with some of his belongings from the war. that's about as close as I've gotten to realy knowing him.

Maternal grandmother: left school at 16, worked as a post office clerk and a telephonist that I know of. During the war she worked at an artillery factory in Sunshine just outside Melbourne. We have newspaper clippings of the notices she posted in the local papers requesting information on the whereabouts of my grandfather, and we have a letter from a returned soldier who told her he had seen my Grandad in the Burma camp in the infirmary, and that he was still alive.
After grandad returned home, she worked mainly as a housewife, but was heavily involved with Legacy (a charity for the families of deceased servicemen), as well as a local orphanage and quite a few sporting organizations like the loca tennis club, as well as church fundraising.

It's funny, even though Nan didn't have a 'job', I always remember her being busy. She died when I was 16, so by the time I was old enough to know, intellecutally & emotionally what my Grandad had lived through, she wasn't around for me to talk about it with her. And it's sad, because she would talk to me about pretty much anything, and told me lots of stories about her life so I know I would have learned a lot about Grandad from her.

I really miss her.

maternal grandfather: fireman
maternal grandmother: alcoholic

paternal grandfather: he did "tool and die" in factories, first in Germany, then in Detroit and finally in Connecticut. Also worked as a chauffeur during the depression.
maternal grandmother: homemaker, but worked as a cook during the depression, I think for the same rich people my grandfather chauffeured for

interesting things about my grandparents:

maternal grandmother's father was apparently an extremely wealthy industrialist of some sort, but he disowned her for some reason and I think she always hated my grandfather for not being rich. perhaps this partly led to the alcoholism.

my paternal grandfather died in the 60s and my paternal grandmother later married an ex-jesuit priest (who, from what I gather, basically left the priesthood because my grandma was too foxy), but he then died less than a year after they got married.

strangely I have no idea if either of my grandfathers were ever in WW II or any other war really

my maternal grandfather was asst secretary for labor
my maternal grandmother was a librarian

i dont really know what my other grandparents did, cocktail parties i guess

Paternal Grandfather - Worked for the Gas Company, painted a lot in his off-time
Paternal Grandmother - Worked for MGM as a producer's assistant

Enatic Grandfather - Federal Judge
Enatic Grandmother - Worked for the State of CA but I don't remember exactly what

My maternal grandfather has a wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Pallett

He was the son of a grocer, friends with Donald Sutherland and very popular in his riding. He resigned from Parliament in disgrace, though, after accusations of cronyism surfaced regarding the construction of YYZ airport. He also played a role in the cancellation of the Avro Arrow's development, and was depicted as an antagonist in a documentary.

My paternal grandfather dug up the hills of Devonshire for coal, then he had a change of heart, and built a kiln and sponsored local potters.

My maternal grandmother was briefly a member of the chorus of the Canadian Opera Company; I have no idea what my paternal grandmother did but she was an imposing figure who drank gin and smoked cigarettes and had a garden in rural Northumberland.

I'm a bit ashamed that I don't know all the answers to this. Questions to ask next time I'm home. My maternal grandmother was a ropeworker and my paternal grandmother was a french polisher. Good grandparent jobs, both of them.

maternal grandfather: WWII, worked for the VA after that
maternal grandmother: nurse, then full time irish catholic baby machine.

paternal grandfather: jazz guitarist
paternal grandmother: big band singer, eventually nurse

paternal grandfather: secondary school teacher
paternal grandmother: housewife, mother, IRA sympathiser

maternal grandfather: civil engineer
maternal grandmother: housewife, mother

Early-20th-century small-town Ireland not a place of great opportunity for women, I think. I never met either of my maternal grandparents and I really know very little about them, might ask some questions next time I'm home.

One odd side-effect from having older parents (my dad was 50 when I was born) is that whenever I see "WWII" in conjunction with someone's grandfather I keep thinking of my dad (who was in the Merchant Marines during the early Battle Of The Atlantic days) and suddenly feel older than I am.

White grandfather was a cabinet maker.
Not 100% sure about black one but I think either him or his wife had a shop in the Kenyan village my dad grew up in. Never met him , think I did meet her.

Lived with white one for a few years as a child. Or maybe more my family did.

Paternal grandfather: farmer
Maternal grandfather: university professor

Both grandmothers were housewives, though I seem to recall my maternal grandmother taught school for a few years.

maternal grandfather: returned from ww2 with no real work history, and wound up owning a steel mill. some real horatio alger shit, at least until the steel market collapsed in this country. which explains to some extent was how i was born into a working poor household while my mom grew up wearing kiddie fur coats. i dont think my grandfather's heroic boozing really helped with the business stuff either, mind you.

maternal grandmother: betty draper, essentially, until aforementioned collapse of business, after whic she worked in a department store.

paternal grandfather: fuck if i know. took off when my dad was a kid.

paternal grandmother: literal shut-in.

Strongo is basically Sally and Glen's son

at my parents' for christmas and my (english) mom who grew up in colonial singapore visited england the other month for first time in many years and i have pictures of (pictures of) my maternal grandparents now, plus i have been checking w her re: details, so

grandfather was royal navy ww2, and then a writer of high-seas-adventure novels and a history of singapore, and also was a kind of impresario (such that my dad who is from ohio and was putting up and taking down tents for a traveling production of peter pan met my mom cuz her dad was producing its singaporean stop), while

grandmother (chic as fukk there imho) was a textbook author and gallery owner who died in a car crash decades before i was born that also killed my mom's older sister but which my mom survived. eventually my grandfather remarried and moved back to oxford and by then i don't think there was very much money anymore. met him a few times when i was young; he looked like cuba-era hemingway and i made a "radio drama" where he voiced a wizard.

i don't have pictures handy of my dad's parents but grandfather returned from the war and bought/ran a bar in shelby, ohio; grandmother was i think a housewife but my dad talks about her very little. i met her as a little kid, but never him; he died when my dad was in his 20s. none of these people survived long enough for me to get a clue about asking them to tell me stuff, which i feel p dumb about; but they were always very far away and i only occasionally saw the two i met.

Farmers/

Played the organ on the radio, was apparantly a very big deal.

Maternal grandfather - Fisherman. Died 1965, before I was born
Maternal grandmother - Housewife

Paternal grandfather - Butcher. Died 1994, his funeral was the day my son was born so didn't go to it.
Paternal grandmother - Housewife. Died 1991.

He appeared in the October 1952 edition of National Geographic magazine on an article on Holy Island, Northumberland.

http://i1088.photobucket.com/albums/i329/yorkshiresky/IMG244.jpg?t=1356355303

He was itinerant in more ways than one as he divorced my grandmother in the late 50s and moved in with a woman who was about 20 years younger than him. In late 1950s Berwick that just wasn't the done thing and caused a lot of friction within the family at the time.

psychologist
geologist
psychologist
cement salesman

opera singer
forest ranger

My gran worked at Linotype from the age of 15 until 60. I find this incredible.

Great-great grandfather - drove a streetcar
Great-grandfather - drove a truck
Grandfather - drove delivery trucks, mail vehicles
Father - Real estate sales, delivery

I'm the first one stuck in an office. At least now I know where my desire to be a trucker has always come from.

Grandma: Doughnut shop during the war, GM after

Grandpa: Sailor during the war, fireman after, installed water heaters and sump pumps after smoke inhalation during rescues caused him to lose a bit of lung and retire.

I found out during my parents' visit last week that my paternal great-grandmother (who was a lifelong liberal and lived on the gulf coast of FL) was still mowing her own lawn at 87, and one day on her walk to the market got run over by a truck. She was hit from behind so she probably had no idea what happened. Not a terrible way to go, but I hope it doesn't run in the family.

Me in 2007:

Paternal GF: no idea, don't think he had a job since I was born

Found out at his funeral last year the reason for this was he got PTSD after serving in the Malayan Emergency as a 20-ish year old. Which apparently was why he didn't turn up to my wedding or see us ever. Although, as my dad said, he could make it out to the pub alright.

maternal GF: barber/barbershop owner
maternal GM: homemaker, volunteer pollster
paternal GF: bartender/waiter
paternal GM: nurse

I also had a paternal step-grandfather but I have no idea what he did besides drink; I believe my paternal step-grandmother was also a homemaker but I'm not 100% sure