About this site¶

generation.forret.com is a consolidated reference about the human generations, from the Lost Generation (born 1883) to Generation Alpha (born through 2024). For each generation it gathers, in one place, the things that are usually scattered across many separate articles:

• the birth-year range that defines the cohort,
• the notable people born into it,
• the memorable quotes associated with it, and
• the defining events it lived through, with the age the cohort was at the time.

The goal is to be a clear, consistent, cross-generational reference — the angle that single-topic encyclopaedia articles tend to fragment.

How things are anchored to a generation¶

There is one core rule, and it depends on the type of thing:

• People are anchored by birth year ("born-in"). A person belongs to the generation whose range contains their year of birth. This drives every people list, the per-field breakdowns (actors, musicians, politicians, …) and the A–Z index.
• Events are anchored by when they happened ("lived-through"). An event is placed relative to each generation by the age that generation was when it occurred, not by who it was "about".

Year ranges are treated as fixed and canonical and are reused identically on every page, so the same facts appear everywhere (no page contradicts another).

Life stages¶

When we describe how old a generation was at an event, we use four plain-language life stages based on age:

Because a generation spans about 15–20 birth years, at any given event its members fall across a range of ages — so a stage may be shown as a span (for example "school–working"). Events that happened before a person was 6 years old are left out of "what they lived through", on the basis that they are not personally remembered.

Event importance (weight)¶

Each event carries an importance score from 0 to 5:

• Weight 5 events are the defining milestones shown on every generation page ("how old they were when…").
• Weight 4 and up events are listed on each individual birth-year page.

This lets a small set of truly era-defining moments stand out from routine entries.

Sources & accuracy¶

• Birth-year boundaries follow the widely-used consensus ranges; we deliberately do not invent new boundaries, so the site corroborates rather than contradicts the common understanding.
• Biographical context for people is drawn from public encyclopaedic sources (Wikipedia previews) and kept short.
• If you spot an error or omission, it is almost always a data issue that can be corrected at the source and regenerated.

How the site is built¶

The pages you are reading are static HTML. They are generated from a structured dataset (generations, people, events and quotes), exported to Markdown, and built into a static site with MkDocs + Material. There is no client-side rendering: every page is plain, crawlable HTML, and the full set of pages is listed in the auto-generated sitemap.xml.

Maintained by Peter Forret. Last reviewed 2026.