They were very tough people. How can I say this better? They were always very opinionated sometimes in scary ways. They tended to be very very cynical or very religious or very spiritual. After all they had to have witnessed almost everyone they knew die by the time I met them. The youngest by then were only 50 to 55 and were born between 1895 and 1900. But, I also met people who had been born in the 1840s or 1850s who were 90 to 100 years old or more. But, all these people were not like people of today at all in some ways. They were tough in a way I cannot even describe. I have seen this kind of toughness when I went to Asia especially to India, Nepal and Thailand too.
But, mostly it is about being able to watch hundreds of people you love die in sometimes horrible ways without anti-biotics from accidents or illnesses and finding some way psychologically or physically or just through a really strong immune system that kept you going on no matter what happened........
They were all strong settler stock usually and often came from the East Coast or other places all over the world in between before they made their way to the state of Washington (where I lived from 1948 until 1952) or in California where I lived from 1952 onwards mostly until now except for about a year in New Mexico and about the same in Hawaii on the big island and on Maui.
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