Those Old Fashioned Skills Could Save Your Life

What old fashioned skills and abilities did your grandparents or
great-grandparents have that, if you had those skills, would help you to
survive in the event of a long-term survival situation: a real TEOTWAWKI
(aka: "the end of the world as we know it")? This is the question that
was asked in a blind study of a group of online workers.

Here are the old fashioned skills most identified as being employed by
their ancestors and considered necessary to survival:

1. Hunting - My grandfather and father were good hunters; we always had
meat on the table.

2. Foraging - They also gathered nuts and berries which were wonderful
to eat!

3. Cooking from scratch - My grandmother could cook anything and made
breads from scratch. She could separate chickens and clean and gut fish.

4. Cooking using firewood. I remember when I was small, my grandmother
cooked using firewood and she never got burned or overcooked anything.
Now I use a modern gas stove and can never get it right.

5. Spinning yarn - They could make yarn themselves, as well as knit and
crochet, so they could make sweaters to stay warm.

6. Shoemaking - My grandfather was a shoemaker.

7. Sewing – My grandmother sewed her own clothes. Born in 1901, she had
4 children and made all their clothes by making patterns from
newspapers or meat wrapping papers.

8. Dowsing for water - My grandfather (who was of Cherokee Indian
descent) had the ability to find water located underground (for wells) using
metal rods. This is known as "witching" in the Oklahoma area.

9. Farming - Both of my grandfathers had farms where they grew crops,
vegetables and raised livestock.

10. Crafting - They were craftsman and were able to work on fixing
almost any item, making new tools, building homes and farming

As this last person describes, our grandparents and great-grandparents
employed a variety of old fashioned skills and were all about
surviving:

“I'm most impressed that they knew how to live off the land and how to
make everything they needed. They knew how to make butter, candles,
soap and clothing, and how to hunt and process meat - i.e. smoking,
curing, defeathering, beheading etc. They could be described as being very
practical, frugal, and pragmatic - as opposed to being rather squeamish
and wasteful like most people in the U.S. today.

They were also better prepared to cope with people around them dying
since people died all the time back then from diseases, infections,
injuries, accidents, natural disasters etc. but they still had to tend to
the demanding crops, animals, or other kids.”

We would all do well to learn some of those old fashioned skills, lest
we some day fail to survive a situation that our ancestors would have
taken in stride.