Given the circumstances under which my mother's father grew up, I still wonder if the saying "If you were hungry enough, you'd eat a rat," that my mother said she got from him came from actual family tradition vs. just being something parents say to get their kids to stop complaining. My mother and I always wondered if somewhere, someone on that side did have to eat rats if you went enough generations back--because they were poor enough and rural enough that it would have been plausible!

The other thing we wondered about was the "Thank god for the good clean water" said by my great-great-great-grandmother (different lineage, not Grandpa's), who came over in the Irish famine, every time she took a drink. Did she grow up thanking God for the water because of a time when there was no food and water was all they had, or was there a time when they didn't have potable water?

...Actually, it literally just occurred to me typing that: the coffin ships. It might not have been in Ireland that she started saying that/repeating what the adults said. It might have been from the trip over! Potable water is notoriously hard to get on ships, and the ships that brought the Irish over were called coffin ships for a reason, namely not because they were concerned with passengers' survival!

Too bad I didn't think of this while she and I were still speaking, damn.