Do you know your great-grandmother's name?

Some tut-tutting going on about the recent study which found that a quarter of Britons don't know which historical figures were real and which were myths. But let's not be too hard on them.
A thousand years ago, as James Burke has pointed out, people lived happy and productive lives even though they thought the sun revolved around the earth.
And a year ago, the President's press secretary didn't know what the Cuban Missile Crisis was all about.
For most of us, any event whether truth or fiction that happened before our parents were born is basically an historical event.
And most of us don't remember our own great-grandmother's maiden name.