Living Like the Past

Charles and I have started a new study. We are moving further back in time. We are changing things up a bit and instead of studying one year we will be doing a study of 1900 to 1939.Our brains are a bit exhausted right now because it has been a lot of research getting ready for this year.Our past 4 years have been studying the home front during world war 2. This time we are going to nestle down in 1932 but we will start in 1900 looking back to how our Generations before us lived. We had to go further back because to be adults in 1932 we needed to understand what their life would have been like leading up to 1932.Charles and I have made many discoveries and found many ......

December is certainly a busy month for Charles and I. This year had so many challenges that my good intentions of making homemade gifts came down to starting very late making them. It feels that there has been not a minute to spare.I cannot show the things I have been making since they are gifts but I am all done now and what is not being given personally have been shipped.And so now I am just enjoying Now. I am not rushing the things I do and I have hopefully learned my lesson that February is a great time to start making gifts and late December and early January is a good time to buy supplies to make those gifts.This seasons lemons are now preserved and I have a couple ......

We are getting ready to start our new study that we will be doing during the real year of 2019. We normally take on a new study each year and we will be moving away from studying the Home front during ww2. Charles and I have been continuing to move back in time while most people are moving forward. I do not study politics, Charles does study Presidents of the past but as we have done in our other studies our main interest is about how families lived in the past, food, shelter, food preservation and what we can learn about the home and the home front. I have been asked how we do our studies and the way we do this is we go to our public library research room and read boo ......

Here we are almost at the end of 2018 which for us the end of 1944. Even though I did not do a lot of post about our 1944 year, other than the first few months we continue to live our old fashioned 1944 life with a few exceptions that modern life controls. This is the link to the January 2018 post at the beginning of our 1944 year... http://gdonna.com/living-like-the-past/we-are-almo...This year we made many changes to our home. It got so crazy that I could not even post about it because I just wanted it finished. We started off energized with learning new things about 1944 and living a more simple life. Then we decided it was time to organize and paint the kitchen, th ......

It is getting that time for another history project here at our home. We have studied the 1940s home front for many years now. We started with WW2 rationing and went through many of the early 1940s learning about how people lived while the war was going on. We learned how the ration cards were used and how people pulled together here at home so food and ammunition and goods could be sent to the fighting troops.How men, women and children worked hard pitching in to fill empty positions as people joined the armed services. How victory gardens were grown just about anywhere there was dirt to plant vegetables and fruits.How important home canning was during the war a ......

It has been very busy here at our house. I buckled down last week working on the mending pile. I also made slip covers for my favorite rocking chair. I had this toile fabric stored away and finally got it out to make Slip covers for this chair.I put the cushion on top of the backside of the fabric and made sure the print would be in the right direction.Then I took my ruler and cut 9 inches around the cushion. Now I warn you I don't go by patterns or sewing rules, I just do what I think will work.I pressed down around the edge and then sewed that down then turned it over again leaving enough room to run elastic through it with a large safety pin pushing the ela ......

This past summer Charles and I worked on changing our backyard garden to a larger container garden. We purchased large cattle troughs and drilled holes in the bottom edge to drain and filled them with garden soil and compost. I did not take a lot of summer garden pictures because we did not grow a lot of vegetables. We grew, cucumbers and bell peppers, some early sugar peas and a few things but mostly we planned for a fall garden because I cannot work in the heat. I am older and I cannot tolerate the heat but also it is just plain hot now. The climate is changing and we gardeners are having to change too.This picture above is what is growing now.The November ......

This is a socially busy time of the year. It costs the family a lot of money to go along with holiday traditions and all of this is man made. Somewhere the festivals traded for holidays and now have no resemblance at all of what once they were started.Here at our house we don't pay much attention to man made holidays, we celebrate in our own way. We acknowledge the seasons and our faith is year around. To live a simple life we set our self apart in a way but we still are social but in a much calmer way.After all we are the keepers of the home. We do not have to be boastful or proud as there is no need for this as we become more knowledgeable of important things.& ......

I have had this blog for many years, I started it off in early 2000 for doing genealogy and sharing pictures and information with my family, I called my blog generations before us. A little time went by and the economy got bad and I thought about how our generations before us survived through wars and the great depression and I wanted to help people that were struggling with the broken economy.I outgrew my website and had to upgrade and I lost some old posts then another upgrade as my blog was growing. Then another upgrade again and that is when I renamed it to gdonna so I cannot remember how long I have been doing this blog.Andra's window...I have read many emails over the years and s ......

My last post was written just after our internet had been restored from damage due to Hurricane Michael.Here at our house, damage was to the trees and garden and outdoor structures. We had a power outage, a kitchen ceiling water issue in our kitchen ceiling and which ended up not being a serious issue inside but a lot of work to do outside.Even though we were very prepared I was mentally drained. It had been frightening to me as I kept thinking if this wind gets only 5 or 10 more miles per hour we are in very serious trouble. We could hear and feel the strength of the wind, we could hear the trees cracking and the large thuds as whole trees went down and we could hear ......

The week before Hurricane Michael hit, I was outside in the backyard planting turnips and carrots. Charles was outside as well and we looked up to the sky and saw this. I ran in and got my camera and asked Charles I wonder why we were suppose to see a cloud that looked like angel?This is completely untouched, I snapped the pictures with my phone first then my camera. I realize it is just a cloud but I do say a very impressive one and the bottom cloud and the beams of light were just beautiful.Little did I know what was about to happen and that we would be ok.The very next week we all knew about Hurricane Michael. After the storm, 80 percent of the city had lost power a ......

Hello everyone! This is Grandma Donna's daughter. As some of you know, Hurricane Michael hit the Gulf Coast, Southeast corner of Alabama and then kept going. There is a lot of damage to mom's city of Dothan and 80% of the city has lost power. My mom wanted me to let you know that they are ok but have a lot of work and repairs to do due to high wind damage. Their power is out and also internet. Mom wanted me to tell you she is reading your emails from her phone but cannot respond because she is trying to save power on her phone for emergencies. It may take some time for her to get back to posting. She said to tell you that when the power is out take frequent cool baths and to cook pancakes. : ......

My Grandmother taught me the most important life lessons without any words. I learned from observing the things she did. She was never boastful, never, not once. She was gentle, kind, compassionate and went about the things she did in a very purposeful way.My grandparents never had wealth, they eloped on a mule when they were young teens. My Grandfather made enough for them to buy the things they needed but as far as I know that was how it had always been.My Grandmother a quiet woman with strong faith that never wavered.She would sleep at night in a full slip and I never knew her to have pajamas or gowns until later in life, she would cover with her robe. She never ha ......

Sometimes I am not sure where this life is taking us since it is always changing. The longer I live the more I wish I had just kept life simple since the beginning of marriage. I think about the money that could have been saved if I had not let modern times convince me that we need to live modern.Maybe modern is not the right word, maybe being a constant consumer is more like it. We are almost brainwashed to keep consuming and now there are mini warehouses all over the place that people rent to hold the extra stuff that they have.I will first update just a bit on where we are with the remodel. Remember the issues we had with our new HE (high efficiency) washing machin ......

Many boxes of stuff has left our home. I lost count of the trips to the donation places. The top bag sitting on the boxes is synthetic yarn. Over the years I have found I prefer to knit and crochet with 100 percent cotton yarn or wool. So to free up space I kept only the cotton and wool yarn donated the other yarns.If you have been following my blog you will have read that we live in a small home of 1100 square feet and basically moved out of part of our house and turned that part into an apartment. This left us with much less space to live so we had to really think about what we were going to do. Basically we were moving into a small apartment so we had to condense ......

Our little dog (girl) Katherine, is getting gray. She is 10 years old already. It seems that she was just a puppy. She will be 11 in December. We call her Katherine The Investigator. She wants to investigate everything we are doing.Elizabeth is our Middle girl and is extremely sensitive. She was handled roughly as a puppy and dropped many times by young children that carried her around by the neck. The lady said she had to get rid of her before the youngest child killed her. she is afraid of many things, something that moves quickly and something that drops to the floor. She is even afraid of rain bubbles. The rain drops falling ......

When I was a child I made Mississippi Mud Pies. If you thought this post was going to be about some kind of a dessert, it is not.I am talking about real mud pies from the Mississippi Delta. I had my wooden table made out of a board on top of blocks and a stick for a spoon. I had a real kitchen made from limbs that had fallen from trees. All you need for a real kitchen is to pull the limbs to a flat area and form them into a square or rectangle, just remember to leave a space for that door. I made the mud pies and fed them to my imaginary friends and I served them on plates made out of leaves. The conversation was always wonderful.I had an imaginary monkey ......

We live close to the football stadium in our small to middle size city. We are no longer a town but a city and just like many today we are growing so fast it is hard to keep up with the changes. But tonight is the first football game of the season. School has just started back after summer break and there has been a lot of hustle and bustle going on with the kids going back to school.We can hear the school band playing tonight and we know when there has been a touchdown from the cheers. We are no longer that small town where most all shopping is done downtown because the stores have spread out all over town and there are large shopping and eating areas just about anyw ......

In our house there are two doorways to a hallway that leads to two bedrooms and a bath and half.I am standing in that hallway with my camera taking a picture of a third bedroom with our little dog Bernadette. Beyond that bedroom is the kitchen/den area and an outside back door.I am still standing in the same spot but turned to my right looking into the second doorway.On one of my recent posts i talked about making an apartment in our home for guests or a family member that might need to come stay or live with us one day.So to make this apartment we needed to close off one of the doorways but it was not that simple as the attic entrance is in this hallway also a closet that is needed fo ......

My old garden shoes have made it another summer season. I am not sure if I can get another one out of them.Last post I mentioned I have had pneumonia and it gave me a lot of time to think. I have not done a from my heart post in awhile but I thought it time to do one. Charles and I have been working our way back in time for many years now. Back in the 1990s we were both working outside the home jobs, going about our busy life like most people, eating out, buying what we wanted and did not have a clue what was ahead for us.The sudden decline of parents and the wake up call that we should have been preparing instead of just living.I quit my job to become a caregiver which t ......