11 Skills Your Great-Grandparents Had That You Don’t

Jim_S · Jul 21, 2014

11 Skills Your Great-Grandparents Had That You Don’t

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.

http://blogs.ancestry.com/cm/2014/0...xid=60678&o_lid=60678&o_sch=Content+Marketing

Andrei · Jul 21, 2014

Stone craft.
My grandparents home was built by stone blocks squared by hand and partially dug into the hillside.
The "road" is made of stone blocs and still exists today.

FrancSevin · Jul 21, 2014

Wanna bet.

I learned to do them all and then some. milking cows, driving a mule powered plow, rope making, black smithing, All that stuff.

Old farms have several buildings. The house was small only the outhouse was smaller. A shop for manufacturing daily needs (soap, candles, underwear, socks, nails, hingess), a barn for the animals a chicken coop (which might be smaller than the house), A smoke house and a pile of firewood that needed constant replensihment.

40 acres would keep you fed and warm if you had all these assets to work from dawn to dusk.

Now we just sit in front of our big screens, in airconditioning, and order Pizza.

Jim_S · Jul 21, 2014

Frank, so did I but we're both antiques. I did skip the mule drawn plow though. We had a one person powered push plow for the garden and a Minneapolis-Moline Z for the heavy stuff :yum:

Jim

FrancSevin said:
Wanna bet.

I learned to do them all and then some. milking cows, driving a mule powered plow, rope making, black smithing, All that stuff.

Old farms have several buildings. The house was small only the outhouse was smaller. A shop for manufacturing daily needs (soap, candles, underwear, socks, nails, hingess), a barn for the animals a chicken coop (which might be smaller than the house), A smoke house and a pile of firewood that needed constant replensihment.

40 acres would keep you fed and warm if you had all these assets to work from dawn to dusk.

Now we just sit in front of our big screens, in airconditioning, and order Pizza.

Andrei · Jul 21, 2014

And you do them for a living?
Over the weekend at the ranch I had 2 young men.
They are big.
Over 260 lbs and boxers.
So I asked them to start the fire for breakfast and they were looking around lost.
I showed the few logs and the ax and they got excited.
It was their first time grabbing an ax and got me very worried.
Constantly I repeated "do not hurt yourself", "look before you strike"
They were taking turns and puffing and sweating by the time they got the wood split.
Funny was when they put all the wood at one on the fire and I had to grab it and take some out.

As a kid I assisted few time my uncle making horse shoes from a straight piece of iron.
I suspect that is where I started the obsession with wood fires.
He built me a hay sickle at my size with handle made of cherry wood.
Just like the one Death carries.

luvs · Jul 21, 2014

i've experience w/ most. sans 1. i'm a female/mid-30's. being a brownie/scout was wise. city-dwelling non-fool that i have turned into-- i can also cook, clean, balance 2 toddlers that my pals lent me so they could blink 4 a few, while making lunches, & chit-chatting, cleaning, making bottles, & searching fer binkies while i feed pets.

Andrei · Jul 21, 2014

She might think is normal but ........
Give a live rooster to my wife and one hr later dinner is ready with soup with home made noodles and rooster on rice.
In Sept. we have a goat(billy) planned.

waybomb · Jul 21, 2014

My elders could not use one finger to order 6 vacuum packed Aged Prime Plus New York Strips. But I still have to trim and cook them.

You can have the good ol' days. You can still live that way if you really want to.

Danang Sailor · Jul 21, 2014

FrancSevin said:
Wanna bet.

I learned to do them all and then some. milking cows, driving a mule powered plow, rope making, black smithing, All that stuff.

Old farms have several buildings. The house was small only the outhouse was smaller. A shop for manufacturing daily needs (soap, candles, underwear, socks, nails, hingess), a barn for the animals a chicken coop (which might be smaller than the house), A smoke house and a pile of firewood that needed constant replensihment.

40 acres would keep you fed and warm if you had all these assets to work from dawn to dusk.

Now we just sit in front of our big screens, in airconditioning, and order Pizza.

jim slagle said:
Frank, so did I but we're both antiques. I did skip the mule drawn plow though. We had a one person powered push plow for the garden and a Minneapolis-Moline Z for the heavy stuff

Jim

Guess I'm in the "well-aged" category as well. Making lace is my only failure on that list and if you count rawhide and
leather lacing I can do that too. A bit out of practice with this town living, though. :w00t2:

Jim_S · Jul 21, 2014

Danang Sailor said:
Guess I'm in the "well-aged" category as well. Making lace is my only failure on that list and if you count rawhide and
leather lacing I can do that too. A bit out of practice with this town living, though.

I often helped my grandmother when she made lace. My job was to stay out of the way and be quiet. :whistling:

EastTexFrank · Jul 22, 2014

I guess that you better put me with the old timers as well. I can do most things on the list although I never tried lace making (I used to be able to knit) and my courting skills are a little rusty.

As a kid growing up in Scotland just after WW11, I used to spend part of every summer working (kind of) at my uncle's croft, a little farm of about 15 acres. It had no electricity or running water. Heat was either from wood (seldom), coal (too expensive) or mainly peat. It was a great adventure as a youngster but would I want to go back to living like that? I don't think so, I'm too fond of my creature comforts. But, could I go back to living like that? Yes, if I was forced, I probably still could. I remember that my uncle put in long days and a lot of sweat just to make do.

muleman · Jul 22, 2014

Learned a lot of my skills from grandpa and still utilize some of them today. If I had to go back to those days it would kill me quickly. Like using my skid steer to move a good sized building yesterday. I could have done it with mules but it would have been a lot harder and would have involved a lot of rehooking to position it exactly. I just put the forks on the skid and chained it to the fork rack. Did have the Amish boys jump on the counterweight going up the slope so the back wheels would have traction. :whistling:

EastTexFrank · Jul 22, 2014

muleman said:
If I had to go back to those days it would kill me quickly.

That was the point that I was trying to make. I COULD do it but I don't know how long I would last.

One thing that I do remember about my early childhood was that there were a lot of burned out, worn out people around. Reaching retirement age was an achievement. Very, very few made it to their 80s. My grandmother made it to 90 but she was 'way too mean to die. Even the devil didn't want her. :biggrin:

Danang Sailor · Jul 22, 2014

EastTexFrank said:
That was the point that I was trying to make. I COULD do it but I don't know how long I would last.

One thing that I do remember about my early childhood was that there were a lot of burned out, worn out people around. Reaching retirement age was an achievement. Very, very few made it to their 80s. My grandmother made it to 90 but she was 'way too mean to die. Even the devil didn't want her.

One of the things I remember - which I only began to think about because of this thread - is the type of old people I knew
as a kid. The really old folks were all farmers and stockmen; cowboys if you will. People who lived and worked on the
land seemed to live longer than those who lived in towns and cities, even though their lives were harder by most measures.

I knew that back then, but didn't connect the dots until today ... odd how a person can have a piece of information and
never really process it until many years later. Now that it's on my mind it's clear that was too consistent a pattern to be a
coincidence. I'm going to have to do some research to see if that pattern still exists.

Leni · Jul 22, 2014

It could be because they didn't sit on their butts all day. They used up the cholesterol by working hard and not getting way overweight. A lot of the diseases we see today are because of inactivity.

Catavenger · Jul 22, 2014

Since my grandfather was a professional butcher I'm sure he was pretty good at it.
I can haggle and barter and if I had to I'm sure I could start a fire without matches or a lighter. I've used old fashioned pens and corresponded by mail. I don't think that many men of that era could make lace.
It is amazing how quickly things change. In the 1930's my father worked for a bakery and for a time used a horse drawn cart to make deliveries.

EastTexFrank · Jul 23, 2014

Catavenger said:
In the 1930's my father worked for a bakery and for a time used a horse drawn cart to make deliveries.

My father as a young man, teenager really, worked for a dairy and made all his deliveries by horse drawn cart.

Even I can remember as a kid we had our coal, dairy products and vegetables all delivered by horse drawn cart. That doesn't include the junk man who used to come around collecting scrap metal and the guy who used to sharpen knives from a horse drawn buggy.

Jeez, how far we've come and many of us have no idea what we left behind.

Andrei · Jul 23, 2014

I grew up learning how to write with a fountain pen.
Used to make a mess refiling it.
They were a nice piece of craftsmanship.

11 Skills Your Great-Grandparents Had That You Don’t

Jim_S

Gone But Not Forgotten

Andrei

Banned

FrancSevin

Proudly Deplorable

Jim_S

Gone But Not Forgotten

Andrei

Banned

luvs

'lil yinzer~

Andrei

Banned

waybomb

Well-known member

Danang Sailor

nullius in verba

Jim_S

Gone But Not Forgotten

EastTexFrank

Well-known member

muleman

Gone But Not Forgotten

EastTexFrank

Well-known member

Danang Sailor

nullius in verba

Leni

Active member

Catavenger

New member

EastTexFrank

Well-known member

Andrei

Banned