Posted on 06/02/2014 3:35:50 AM PDT by kingattax
Our parents and grandparents may shake their heads every time we grab our smart phones to get turn-by-turn directions or calculate the tip.
But when it comes to life skills, our great-grandparents have us all beat. Here are some skills our great-grandparents had 90 years ago that most of us don’t.
1. Courting
While your parents and grandparents didn’t have the option to ask someone out on a date via text message, it’s highly likely that your great-grandparents didn’t have the option of dating at all.
Until well into the 1920s, modern dating didn’t really exist. A gentleman would court a young lady by asking her or her parents for permission to call on the family.
The potential couple would have a formal visit — with at least one parent chaperone present — and the man would leave a calling card. If the parents and young lady were impressed, he’d be invited back again and that would be the start of their romance.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.ancestry.com ...
One of the few good things were more critters, less people and cleaner waters.
It's over-rated. Flush toilets and indoor running water are pretty darn nice to have.
I have the skillsets to live a mid-1800s lifestyle. I chose not to.
/johnny
Related:
http://www.amazon.com/Handy-Farm-Devices-Make-Them/dp/1604595868
I have this book - it’s fascinating.
I found it humorous that one of the reviews on Amazon complained that the book only included a picture of the device and not “how to make it”.
Another person commented back that, to the people of that era, the picture WAS “how to make it”.
.hey, is that an ant on the desk?
I use “hey did you see the shiny read squirrel”, when I lose my train of thought at the office.
Either people laugh ( of certain age) or I get very strange looks from the other age group.
In the military, we called that "Field expediency".
I have never dug a well, but repaired one twice in the dead of winter.
An experience I hope never to repeat
interesting posts
10 out of 11 here. I hate lace.
I tried making lace and thought I’d go blind.
No.
Yes.
No.
There are currently more critters then there were 100 years ago, there were less people but the water was much less clean. There really is not that much truly clean water in nature and prior to sewage treatment plants there was a lot of stuff that was just dumped into rivers and streams.
“I read once that 1/3 of all Revolution-era marriages were to pregnant brides. Their morals may not have been much better than ours, but their willingness to accept responsibility for their actions was evidently much greater.”
I think it wasn’t so much that they got married because they got pregnant, but that they got pregnant because they knew they were going to get married.
The ‘problem’ is that we have gone on to depend on everything being done for us that we can often not function at all without so many things being done for us.
When I got my first job working ad McDonald’s back in high school we made change not the computer the ‘cashier’ did it. Now most checkout people couldn’t make change for a $5.00 bill for a $4.99 purchase.
I am not saying this skills are essential to live, but the basic skill, the willingness to learn and do and a heavy dose of just plain old common sense is missing from today’s society.
And I pray to God that there will never come a time when we must live even for any more than short while as our grandparents did, because without these ‘conveniences’ we are use to I doubt many could make it very long.
I am 73 and I can’t make lace or start a fire without matches, so you are one up on me. :)
Preppers’ PING!!
Hat tip to goodwithagun for the heads-up,
My post #52 this thread.
Yeah, but you turned 18 in, what, 1806?
As I noted in my post about TX, without some of our modern “conveniences” some areas of the country become all but uninhabitable.
6 - Mending & 8 - Tatting
I still do that!!
And I have made my own soap!.
Still haven't figured out that lighter thingy huh?:)
I have been looking for a lace making class too and I can’t find one anywhere!
One thing I don’t get it what about the lower classes? For those who didn’t have calling cards?
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