LINKING CENTURIES

Te Aroha News, Volume XLI, Issue 6441, 22 January 1924, Page 5

LINKING CENTURIES

CHAIN OF MEMORIES A correspondent recently wrote to the Daily Chronicle claiming a moth-er-in-law who is 93 years of age and has 186 descendants, including 10 great-grand-children, and suggests a link with the future which may easily surpass anything that has happened in the past. This lady, who was born seven years before Queen Victoria came to the throne, may have heard an account of the coronation of George 111. from one who was present in 1761. She is in full possession of her faculties, and tells her great-great- i

grandchildren the memories of her youth, as old people love to do. One at least of these children may conceivably see the present century out. Thus there would be a word to mouth link between the 18th and the 21st centuries, in which only three •lives were concerned. '

In theory, of course, there is no reason why people living to-day should not have hearsay scandal passed from generation to generation about Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. . •

The best known example of this verbal bridging of the centuries is related by the famous Dean Ramsay. He was sent at the age of eight to live with,*#, -grand-uncle, Vwho died hi 1806, aged 9i. This veteran was born in 1715, and had been placed, when a youth, in a London bank. One of the partners was 89, and was eight years old when his father took him to see the execution of Charles 1., of which he was fond of talking. Dean Ramsay died in 1872, and there must be people alive who heard him relate the events, at n0.,,.m0re than third hand, of 1649.

Even this is small beer compared with the feats of the bards in Neolithic times. They must have passed from mouth to mouth across thousands of years their songs and legends until writing was invented, and epics such as the. Iliad and the Odyssey were enshrined in permanent form.