I recall when I was 4 years old (1954) my father pointed out a man smoking a pipe on the porch of the local veteran’s home. He say the man was 105 years old and had fought in the Civil War. The man died later that year.
My great grandfather fought in the CW and my grandfather fought in WWI. I never met my great grandfather because he died 30 years before I was born but my grandfather rarely mentioned the Argonne forest where his unit confronted the Germans.
Time does indeed march on, but when I work out the number of generations of my family all the way back to the revolutionary war, it wasn’t that many. The USA has indeed been here for a very short time.
Poser, I am exactly the same age as you and three of my great-grandfathers fought in the Civil War, two for the North, and one for the South. I have seven four times great-grandfathers who fought in the Revolutionary War, one was a British soldier captured by Americans in 1777. He stayed here after his release in 1782. Another was at the Battle of Yorktown and saw Cornwallis surrender to Washington.
Yep, my dad's an amateur genealogist. He's tripped over a number of books about our family history (noting remarkable, mostly local histories). He found one journal that was both completely bland and utterly facinating at the same time. Entries like "The town had a dinner this past week, Ebeneezer brought his fiddle for entertainment, his daughter was unable to attend because she is expecting a child." (the fiddle is still in the family, the child - we think - would have been my great-grandmother).
What's particularly interesting is to see how my kids relate. My oldest visited a local Revolutionary War battlefield. "Booring" was the comment. Then, I mentioned that his 5g-grandfather (who, coincidentally, he shares a name with) was one of the Minutemen at North Bridge in Concord. NOW - we're talking. He can't get enough, and everything always relates back to the Minutemen, and Lexington and Concord, and (especially, right now) Paul Revere's ride.
It's all just a matter of finding the right connection. :-)