Recent content by Minerva

I try to stick to what my ancestors would have eaten. It sits better on my stomach, I find. Well, except for the bananas ... I seem to have finally gone allergic to them! That gives me a good assortment of foods to choose from, even if most of it isn't local to us right now. I'm hoping to fix...

I think dirt is a preservative. The worse something looks like when I drag it home, the better condition it's in once all the dirt is off. lol My best salvage to date is a 50s typing table from my mother's basement. She was going to pitch it due to rust and grime, but I dragged it home (over...

Can I ask without giving offense, Foofoogal -- is your family white? I'm thinking perhaps things were different for those on the other side of the colour line, from what you're saying. For women of colour, until the early 20th century the 'norm' in a good portion of Louisiana was not to marry...

I have it on excellent authority that she wasn't married before. Her one uncle was a orderly sort who would have seen to it that the marriage would have been registered with the city, which it wasn't. Her marriage record also lists her as using her father's surname. If she was previously...

I've been having fun with that one pulling up my family's marriage records and cross-checking against when their first was born. I blame the French cultural influences, but it would appear that in their area (New Orleans and environs), the custom was that the one who got her pregnant got to keep...

Mmm, love the tree. We have a green one, but don't have a color wheel for it yet. Your ornaments are stunning, too!

My father's family tends to marry late (late 20s to early 30s). My grandfather was 27 when he married my 17 year old grandmother. As near as I can work out from the available paperwork, she needed to prove how old she was since she didn't have a birth certificate, then she needed parental...

My hair has been going straighter since my daughter was born. I think my great-grandmother would say that someone in the family finally got 'good hair'. :eusa_doh: The lot of us tend to have wild corkscrew curls. The trick is, use a wide-tooth comb while it's wet to unsnarl (or de-dreadlock...

I'd go see my family's speakeasy in New Orleans. Somehow no one has any photos and I'd love to see it. Oh, and even if it's in the wrong sort of neighbourhood for a woman who's not in that line of work, I'd run really fast past my great-great-uncle's 'establishment' in Storyville. Again, the...

I suspect the postcards were a common way of getting photos off to the folks back home. My cousin has been busily scanning in the ones our grandfather sent back to his mother from his stint in the Navy during WWI -- mostly of him goofing off on the ship. Great find, by the way! :eusa_clap

I don't see a problem with using things up. Especially fabrics, when they're not going to last anyway. 'Course, I'm the person who wore out my MIL's parents' tablecloth last year. It was fairly worn by the time we got it, and gave up after just a few years of use. The fabric was...

Cute. :) I'm about to sell off my stash before the elastic goes in them, so if we ever have another kid, I'll have to check out the site to see what's good to get at that point. The husband was initially fighting the cloth ... until he tried to complain to his mother about it. She told him...

Redirected from the now-closed Vintage Mamas thread, so I'll put in my two cents here. :) We did cloth with fleece covers over the diapers, the diapers had snaps so we skipped the pins. I've never swished a diaper in the toilet, soaked a diaper, or felt the need for rubber gloves. I can...

They had computers way back in the day. My father went to college in the 1950s after he got back from the War, and went through his share of punchcards. And the same machine (more or less) was still sitting there when my brother went to college in the 1960s. [huh] Not a computer in the...

We finally got a Sonic near us. Frankly we're disappointed that they close at 11pm. The only time we see it advertised (and thus, think of it) is between 11pm and 3am on cable. At this rate, we'll never get to go! What happened to dives staying open all night? What are we supposed to do for...