Most of us know (knew) our grandparents

[SoCalDem]

Some of us met Great Grandparents and probably few, if any here (or anywhere) ever met a great great grandparent.

That's 4 generations. (100 years) (5 if you count your own)

Ancestry.com considers a generation as 25 years.

Generations close enough for us to have pictures of them or to have known people who DID know them.

Genealogically speaking, that's a short time, and yet in that short time, we may have "electrified" ourselves into a very dangerous world for our own progeny.


Think about the "power" needs of your fore-bearers:

great-great?...may have had electricity, but probably only for a light bulb here and there..probably used a fireplace or more to heat the home...may have had a wood stove to cook on..wealthier may have had an ice-box


great?...probably DID have electricity, but may have still used coal to heat the home..probably had a refrigerator, and maybe even a washing machine. The stove was probably gas (rurals may have still used wood stoves & ice boxes). may have had a radio

grands?... refrigerator, radios, washing machines (many still hanged wash on clotheslines) , toasters, electric stoves, and even some tvs..

Fast forward to now, and try to think of something in your life that does NOT involve "power"..(even peripherally).

The demand for power hit-the-road-running, when lights made it possible for commerce to continue after sundown, and again in a big way when air conditioning became mainstream. Why would anyone want to be sweaty & miserable when A/C could make you comfortable.

No one imagined that all these miraculous inventions might just make things worse over time. In the moment, every new thing is wonderful, because we are never told the true cost. And even if we were, we would probably still want it anyway.

[Tunkamerica]

1. I've got a gas stove, gas water heater, and a coal fire place.

I'm my own great grandparent.

[SoCalDem]

2. you may just be :)

:hi:

[applegrove]

3. I had a grandmother who lived to be 103. She was born in 1898 so she lived

to see three different centuries. She was born before electricity and all the rest came to Nova Scotia. She ran a farm when she was married. We used to joke about how all the survival 'institutional knowledge' in our family was in her so she had better keep alive. She did. She even came with my brother and I to a midnight christmas carole sing at her church when she was 98.

[gateley]

4. My mom was born in 1905, my dad in 1911. They didn't have electricity and

I remember my mom saying they had chicken(s?) in their backyard. This was in Boston! My dad carried ice for his first job when he was still pretty young -- that's how they cooled their food -- ice boxes.

That's all I remember, I sure wish I would have talked to them more about what it was like and the changes they witnessed.

[SoCalDem]

5. It's amaziing isn't it? All that stuff they knew, and how much we would love to have had them write

it all down..

I always admire people who write diaries.

When my aunt passed away, I took her old ledgers from her business and her check book registers.. It's not much, but it's interesting to look at what they bought, and to read the notations she made on the ledger pages:)

I also have some from my grandparents.. He owned several houses, and it;s a real hoot to see the rent receipts.. $25.00 a month for a 4 bedroom brick house:)

[gateley]

13. Aw, how wonderful that you have those "memories"! nt

[truedelphi]

6. My dad was born in 1910, mom in 1220.

He talked about how one of his first memories was seeing a chicken beheaded out in the neighbor's back yard, so that family could have Sunday chicken. And that was inside Chicago city limits.

He talked about Houdini making an appearance in Chicago, I think in the twenties, and he jostled his way through a crowd reported to be about 34,0000 people, so he could get a closer glim pse of the escape artist.

He also was quite good at bath tub gin production, during the Depression, till Prohibition was ended.

My mom's dad was still living inside a little log cabin the first time I remember our driving up to the Northern wilderness of Minnesota. (Circa 1953 or 54.)

The out house was in use, and electricity had just been installed. Later on, family members helped Granpa refurbish the place, and it ended up looking rather conventional, like a tiny ranch house.

The thing that is probably beyond the scope of some children's notions of life is that despite the alck of modern conveniences, people did have fun.

[SoCalDem]

9. In the mid-sixties, my Mother's aunt lived on a farm with NO indoor plumbling

She could have afforded it, but she did not "need" it.. She "fetched" water & had a hand pump in the small room just outside the kitchen.. We always stopped at a gas station before we visited.. no one wanted to try the outhouse:) She did have a phone on the wall.. a WOODEN one with a handle thingie:) We kids always got in trouble for messing with her phone..
Aunt Lide (Alida) was a pip.. Here she is in 1898


She's the tall girl on the left.. My grandfather is the baby on Dad's lap.. His twin sister is on Mom's lap... there would be 4 more chikdren

[gateley]

14. Great stuff! And I think maybe they had MORE fun back then -- what we take

for granted, driving to a state park, for example, was an actual outing! How exciting!

[truedelphi]

7. Oh and one of my favorite stories about the difference between the

Generations - a woman was explaining to her six year old son that when she was growing up, people didn't have DVD's or VCR's. Nobody had personal computers, Blackberries or cell phones.
Same thing with large screen TV's.

The kid looked very confused, and finally blurted out, "But did you have fruit?"

(I read this in a magazine a couple years ago and it cracked me up.)

[Golden Raisin]

11. Explaining about physically

getting up off the sofa or out of the chair to change the channel on a TV seems to blow young folks' minds. The concept of no remote is always greeted with incredulity, amazement and outright disbelief.

[SoCalDem]

12. or havinjg ONE tv in the whole house and ONE phone and ONE bathroom

and having to share a bedroom with maybe 2 siblings:rofl:

[truedelphi]

40. It's amazing any of us survived at all!

Plus what TV we had in the fifties was in black and white.

[tabbycat31]

42. that reminds me of a conversation I had with my cousin last year

I was watching Home Alone with her (she's now 9, I am 30) and I told her that I remember when that movie came out when I was a kid.


We get to the scene where he's flipping channels and she looks at me and says "he's stupid, he just needs to watch Sponge Bob." Her jaw hit the floor when I told her Sponge Bob was not around then. I don't want to even talk to her about the concept of not having a Wii, ipod, etc.

[asjr]

8. I knew my great-grandfather. He was

born in 1854 and remembered the day the Confederate forces came to their farm and conscripted his father. He died in 1950 at the age of 96.

[gateley]

15. Wow - now THAT'S a memory! nt

[Spider Jerusalem]

10. Some things have been good, some not so good

my father's mother told me about outhouses being common in Washington DC, for instance (and this just after the war, so, 1940's). It's kind of hard to imagine indoor plumbing not being common for a lot of people in a major American city THAT recently.

[gateley]

16. Boy, it really is. I thought that everybody (in cities, most certainly) had indoor

plumbing long before then. After the war would make it mid-40's, too!

[Liberty Belle]

17. Mom was born in 1930; she was raised without electricity or indoor plumbing

on a farm in Texas. She talked of being scared of snakes in the outhouse.

Her family grew all their own food and bought only sugar and coffee, she said.

Before my grandparents married, my grandpa was a cowboy on the Chisolm trail!

I never met my great-grandparents, but wish I could've. When my great-grandma was a little girl, her family came to Texas from Tennessee in a covered wagon. There wasn't room for all the kids and all the belongings in the wagon, so the children walked the whole way.

[eShirl]

18. My grandparents still didn't have electricity, into the late 1970s

They lived in rural downeast Maine. I remember visiting as a child. They had a woodstove for cooking, heat & hot water; big elegant glass kerosene lamps for light; an icebox for refrigeration; a "two-holer" outhouse down a short path and just into the woods a little ways.

[Ex Lurker]

19. my grandmother cooked on a wood stove until the early fifties nt.

[FedUpWithIt All]

20. Most older people i know consider those days the "good times"

There has been a lot lost in the speed and "ease" of today.



Knowing for some time, the strain our previous power was putting on the planet we began moving ourselves away from power in areas we felt would be possible without making us feel deprived. We've replaced most of our small electrical appliances with hand powered or do without. We use things like a whirley pop to make popcorn (fun for the kids) as a snack and are planning to grow our own this year. I tend to think that our hand powered french press coffee maker makes the best coffee i've ever tasted. (Some of these are not much of a power use change at this point due to an electric stove being used for things like heating the water but we're moving toward wood for heating water, the environment and for cooking) I currently do a portion of our laundry by hand and line dry. We keep chickens for eggs, a goat for eventual milk and a garden.

We have not had cable in years and run a small 17 inch LCD tv for the kids to watch movies and only run a larger tv for occasional family movie nights. Family board games, lots of reading, outdoor projects done together are things that fill up extra time for us.

We have plans (crossing fingers on the goodwill of the health dept.) to build an energy efficient straw bale home this summer. In the mean time we've been living (6 of us when my 18 yr old is home) in a 900 sq ft two bedroom apt with one bath. Our smaller place runs less power to heat and we run no heat in our own bedroom because we find it too warm with a feather comforter. Our teens, who also spend time with their father, have really taken to the changes. They have really stepped up and seem to be thriving under it all.

Right now, we keep a single phone. Until very recently we kept two older cars which were completely paid off and we're now looking to transfer any value in those vehicles to a diesel truck which we plan to convert to bio diesel.


One area we've been having trouble cutting power use and getting back to a simpler mind frame is with the computers. We depend on them for all of our news, much social, entertainment and communication. We run (at ridiculous expense) satellite because our location currently has no other options. We'd like to upgrade our computers, or more accurately monitors, to run as efficiently as possible because we want to be on a generator and solar before the end of the year and we want to be sure we're accustomed to living within the power restrictions well before then.

It is hard to convey to people how enriching some of these changes have been to our family. Many people look at us as if we must feel deprived but the opposite is true. We feel more in control, less scattered and more content.

[no_hypocrisy]

21. PBS's series "The 1900 House"

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/1900house/

Anyone remember that? I was impressed with the increased amount of work needed for the most mundane chores. Almost an entire day devoted to washing one load of clothes or a mid-day meal. For the latter, chopping the wood to feed the stove that would slowly cook the food. And the acquiring the food taking the better part of a week as it wasn't waiting centralized in a nearby supermarket.

[Ex Lurker]

23. that series had such a great premise

it and the spinoffs: Prairie house, colonial house, etc. It's a shame they didn't do a better job of screening the inhabitants. Most of them didn't really want to be there and brought their modern sensibilities with them instead of trying to live an authentic period lifestyle.

There was a very good Canadian version that featured two couples who really did buy into it, so much so that one of the husbands had to be hospitalized with a serious case of pneumonia because he went without modern medicine.

[FedUpWithIt All]

24. I hand wash clothes and although it is labor intensive it does not take very long.

Even with boiling water for the wash it takes no more than about a half hour a load.



I do agree though that most things definitely took more planning and labor but there is a definite trade off in moving toward modern "convenience". Some of the labor involved in things like food production can be very gratifying.

Edited to add... They recently ran a set of tv series in England called Edwardian Farm and Victorian Farm. They are wonderful.

[madokie]

22. I never met my grand parents on my dads side of the family

beings as my grand dad was born in 1840 and fought to free the slaves, he died in 1910, Grandmother shortly afterwards.

[CommonSensePLZ]

25. 25 years? Uh-uh

A generation is more like 10 or 12 years IMO

[raccoon]

26. IMO I'd say about 30. nt

[SoCalDem]

29. The geneology people consider it to be 25..birth-to-baby

I'm sure it can vary, but most people are parents (or used to be) by the time they were 25, and their child would probably reproduce at around the same age.

Modernity (in OUR culture) may have pushed the age-range, but I still think 25 years is a good range

[raccoon]

31. My family has longer generations.

:hi:

[SoCalDem]

32. keeping those knees together for generations

:rofl:

[CommonSensePLZ]

34. As someone born in

The 80s, I wouldn't consider myself in the same generation as the kids from the 60s or Willow Smith's era. Each generation has its own culture is another thing.

[SoCalDem]

38. you would not be IN their generation.. they might be your parents

depending on which end of the 25 yr span.. Don't know who Willow Smith is :rofl: The 25-yr thing is just a way of measuring time..not for specifically targeting individuals & their birth years:)

2011...back 25 yrs...back another 25 ..rinse repeat:)

[JVS]

27. Power needs are not something new. Deforestation was a serious issue and prompted the switch to coal

[Tracer]

28. As a child in the '50s ...

... I remember visiting my Irish grandfather's house (in the USA).

He had a huge coal stove in his small kitchen that I was fascinated with. He would allow me to raise the cast iron lids (with a specialized tool) and put in more coal.

Holy smokes, did that stove pump out the heat!

And even earlier, while living for a bit with my aunt in Florida, I recall that they had an icebox, not a fridge -- and the iceman's delivery, with his giant tongs, was fun to watch.

[pipi_k]

33. Same generation....

One of the first houses I remember living in had coal heat. I used to love watching the coal truck come and dump it in the cellar through a window. We didn't have circuit breakers, we had fuses. The fuses used to blow on a regular basis, usually at night, leaving us in the dark till my father could go down cellar to change the fuse.

My grandmother had an old treadle-type sewing machine. She pumped the platform on the bottom to make it run...no electricity...although they did have power.

She (and my mom) had an old wringer-type washing machine. On wash day, I loved watching the whole process.

Who knew back then the things we would be using today...

[SoCalDem]

35. Once on HGTV, they were removing an old fireplace mantel and an electric bill

fluttered out when they pulled it down.. It was for $11.00 & change.. the bill was dated in the 50's..and it was in SoCal :rofl:

[LWolf]

30. Nobody knows who my maternal grandfather was.

Nobody but my maternal grandmother ever met him, she never talked about him, but the name she dropped is different than the name she put on the birth certificate. We don't know if either name was real, but it was common.

I know the name of my maternal grandmother, and have a family tree from her branch, but I never met her. My mom wasn't raised by her, and only connected with her at the end of her life.

I never met her parents, either, and have no photos or stories; just their names on the tree.

I knew my paternal grandfather; he died when I was five. I loved him and missed him. I have a few photos and a few memories; no family stories, since I was estranged from my father.

I know who my paternal grandmother was. I spent some time in her home when I was an infant. She did not claim me as a grandchild. I answered a phone she called once when I was 16; my only memory of a contact. She asked who was speaking, I told her, and she asked for an adult in the house without acknowledging that she knew who I was. That's the only contact we ever had. No pictures, no stories, no information about her or her family.

I DID know my first husband's grandmother quite well. She was half Cherokee, and spent her young adult years as a migrant farm worker. I lived with her off and on when my boys were infants. From her I learned how to garden and "put up" the produce, how to pick greens that many thought were weeds to add to the dinner table, how to keep chickens without having to buy much commercial feed, how to process those chickens for the table, how to trap local rabbits, how to show up at local farm fields AFTER the harvest to glean what they left behind, how to use what others saw as junk or trash to repair things, build things...and how to do without electricity. She taught me how to do my laundry, including diapers, with a wash bucket, wash board, and a clothes line. How to manage and cook on a wood stove. How to make candles.

She wanted to teach me to use her guns, to protect myself and to take down rats, possums, rabbits, and other pests invading the garden or henhouse, as pest control and meat for the table, but I drew the line there.

I have a host of stories from her about migrant farm working, about her mother and the reservation she was born on, and about how she lived as a child and young adult.

[Generic Other]

36. The ruins of the house my relatives in Japan are huddling in housed 13 generations

They are staying in part of the house where the roof didn't fall. They are cold, without power and very scared about the radiation heading their way.

[EFerrari]

44. Oh, no.

:hug:

[The Straight Story]

37. Today - if you don't have power, etc, you can have your kids removed from the home

Amazing how times have changed.

[SoCalDem]

39. Isn't that the truth?

times have changed..but not all change is good..some is just change. I guess it's all measured against whatever norm is in fashion at any given time.

[Spike89]

41. Yeah, trade-offs for sure

Consistent and affordable refrigeration, powered medical devices (not to mention labs, hospitals, etc.), climate-controlled homes, emergency communications--these are all part of the huge surge in life expectancy we saw through the 20th century. That it wasn't all positive is no surprise, but I'll take some loss of romanticism over the heartbreak of infant mortality.
As far as generations go, 10 to 15 years is obviously not a generation--I know very few 15-year old parents and no 10-year old ones. However, my son did get to "meet" his great-great-great maternal grandmother and knew his great-great grandmother well into his 20s and just barely missed introducing his daughter to her great, great, great grandmother. My ex-wife's family had a string of very early marriages and children. The great great was 15 when she had the great, who had his grandmother when she was only 14! His mother (my ex) was born to a 16-year old. My son was born on his mother's 18th birthday. The great, great, great grandma was only in her early 80s and still living independently. I believe that my son's great-great grandmother was only 65 when he was born, his great grandmother only 50 and his grandmother only in her mid 30s.
On my side, my son barely got to know his great grandmother. The span there was closer to 30 years between generations than the 15-years of his mother's family. Not solely because the families were so different, but because my direct relatives were relatively late in their respective birth orders, i.e., my father was the 11th of 13 children and his mother was in her 30s when he was born, but she had her first in her teens.
It gets complex when you throw in extremes like my younger brother, who had his daughter at 45. She's nearly 20 years younger than her next youngest cousin and has 4 cousins with their own children older than her. On a family tree diagram, she's in a generation of cousins born almost entirely in the 80s, but she's a full generation behind most of them.

[SoCalDem]

46. "...10 to 15 years is obviously not a generation..."

never said it was.. 25 years was the measuring time used:)

That's 4 generations. (100 years) (5 if you count your own)

Ancestry.com considers a generation as 25 years.

[Spike89]

48. True, you didn't, but someone else did (msg #25)

I was agreeing totally with the 20-25 year generation definition, even while acknowledging that it is a variable in reality (but not 10 years!).

[hunter]

43. My great grandma's house had no plumbing.

She cooked and heated with a wood stove. She had electricity but she only used it for a couple of forty watt light bulbs, a record player, and a radio. The outhouse was quite a ways back into the forest and my mom wouldn't let us kids go out by ourselves at night. (Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!)

Staying at my great grandma's house was like a holiday from bathing and laundry. It was too much work to do either more than once or twice a week.

[hfojvt]

45. I still hang my wash on a clothesline

My sister gave me her old electric dryer, but dang that thing sucks the electricity. I think you could dry the clothes by attaching a fan to the electric meter wheel which seemed to be spinning at 100 RPM.

[JuniperLea]

47. I had this conversation in 1994, just prior to my Great-Grandmother's passing...

Here she is with two sisters, one brother, her mother, and her grandmother... and the family horse, and a new bicycle, which seem to be a great source of pride!






I was fortunate to have had a full set of grandparents on both sides of the family, as well as a full set of great-grandparents. I have other photos of my son, me, my mother, my grandmother, and my great-grandmother... we have a large collection of five-generation photos.

These people taught me so much about making due with what we have, making something from nothing, and getting around town by whatever means possible. They lived without electricity for a long time. But there were candles, a fireplace, and a piano for entertainment. Board games and cards were big... checkers, chess, all sorts of puzzles and games. And books... reading was very important! They got up, and went to bed "with the chickens" so they actually got a full night's sleep! There was a crank Victrola and a large stack of heavy records to play (I still have some of them), but there was no electricity in the house for many, many years. The first radio wasn't introduced to the family until just before WWII.

I've always entertained the idea of living off the grid, in a cabin in the woods... with books, and an old Victrola... and a piano, a guitar... fiddle, autoharp...

[JitterbugPerfume]

49. I am a great grandmother

when my granddaughter had my first great grandson she told me I have always been a great grandmother:loveya:

I remember seeing my great grandma Bland when I was six years old. That would have been in 1946 or 47.

I also remember the first time I watched TV, cars with a crank and rumble seats,and sugar stamps mom had in a dresser drawer left over from the depression. Out side toilets? My father in law still had one of them when I married the first time!

Mom held my great grandson when he was an infant.

That would be mom--me -my daughter --her daughter and her daughters son!