Living In The Past

It reminds me of a tv series in Netflix, " the ministry of time", where you could access different time periods using doors in a corridor

Oopsadaisy1

As long as I could pop in and out I’d like to go back and visit my Grandparents Grt Grandparents and go way back to Grandparents x? To see how they lived and where I came from.
Of course I’d need clothes from those times and old money and i would like to take some gifts and stuff to make their lives easier.
Then it would all get complicated and I might change time and disappear altogether !

You really have a plan worked out?

I would quite like to visit ( for a day) many periods in history, but particularly the 1400’s. I would love to see the countryside in that era, the vast forests and tiny villages.

Although it would be lovely to see parents and grandparents too as Oops says, and yes, you would have to be very careful not to write yourself out of history ( no warning your Mother not to marry your Father!)

I would like to have lived in medieval times - my favourite period of history. I'd have had to have been a nun though, otherwise I'd have died having my first child - sobering thought.

Dartmoorgal, these average life span figures are very deceptive. Infant mortality was very high. Around 1 in 20 or more children died before they were 5 in the 19th century. Now the figure is 1 in 250.

If a child survived there 5th birthday they were likely to live into their 60s or even older, this is regardless of gender or level of wealth (or not). Certain industries did have high mortality, but overall people could expect to live to a reasonable age.

Any one who has done any family history will have noticed that many of their ancestors had reasonable lifespans, well past the 'average' figure, even if they were born and lived in poverty.

My evidence is anecdotal, but, on one side, my family are Irish immigrants to London during the Great Famine. These were as low in society as you could expect to be, best comparison would be being treated like asylum seekers today. At the bottom of every pile.

The majority lived into their 50s/60s. One great great grandfather, born c 1796 lived into his late 80s and my great grandmother, born in 1850, lived to the age of 82. All lived their lives in poverty. I also had a great grandfather who died at the age of 35.

Male or female, I would not live in any age but my own.

Being a woman, no way I would want to live in the past- right wise, medical advances, etc

I have no desire to go back to the past, except that I’d like it if it was considered normal for a mother to stay at home looking after her own children. I think I was one of the last to do that.

I lean more towards owning old things, they've a quality that is no longer being produced- And if I could choose who I could have been in the distant past it would be Abigail Adams- Or even a prominent man who played a part in the formation of this nation, fought in the Revolutionary War, lived long and prospered-

Late Victorian and Edwardian eras, so I could die peacefully before the outbreak of the Great War. THis would make me a contemporay of my great-grandparents, or perhaps even one of them!

The Baroque era would have suited me well, imagine living in Brandenburg while J.S. Bach was court composer to the Duke, and hearing the first performances of some of his greatest works.

Sorry to rain on a variety of parades but the average newborn girl in the Victorian era
would be unlikely to see her 43rd birthday -so we wouldn't be living at all!

NotSpaghetti, you’re probably right! I was fortunate to have a good carefree childhood, leading a sheltered life. Certainly not rich, but enough money for life’s “essentials” but maybe my parents had certain struggles that I knew nothing about.

honeyrose I expect lots of us think back to easier times so I can see how ones own childhood would be appealing. I expect if you were the adult in the house it was just as complicated - but in different ways.

I meant if poor it would have been miserable.

The twenties I love the style and the elegance if wealthy but if not it must have been miserable.

Like many others, I prefer to stay here with mod cons and medical knowledge.

I’d to go back to the 1950’s/early 1960’s when I grew up. Life was simpler, expectations weren’t so high and I was an innocent child with no worries. Maybe that’s the thing - it seemed a better era then because I had no worries! I loved the fashions then too. It is a nostalgic era for me, when I look back.

Smileless2012 - do you have a death wish ? most courtiers around then ended up beheaded! I agree though it would be great to be able to visit these eras just to get a feel for it without having to participate. Trying to decide if I would also like to look at the future - but am less sure .....

But then you would be a different person and may well have had a totally different life - and it does not necessarily mean that it would be a better or more enjoyable life. We continue to make good.bad decisions throughout life and if you can put one right, you may have later made an even worse one.

It is a hackneyed quote because it is so very right 'The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there'. Let sleeping dogs lie, even in wistful desires to go back.

MOnica, that’s another reason I’d like to go back. To deal with those problems the way I should have done at the time, in a more confident way. I might need two weeks instead of one though. ?

No, Andyf* you would meet disillusionment and disappointment, I think we all remember the best from the events that looking back seem the happiest in our lives and forget all the problems we and they were also dealing with.

I would like to go back to being 17 in 1966. I would want the same group of friends with me. I only want to stay for a week.
Just to see if it was as much fun as my memory tells me it was.

At any period in the past, social attitudes would be unacceptable to us, what we would see as the casual cruelty, brutal violence, lack of proper medical facilities. In fact everything would be unpleasant to an extent to totally overshadow any perceived attractions.

My family were mainly agricultural labourers in the midlands or Irish catholic peasants or factory workers. When I first discovered the extent of their poverty, it made me weep. Go back to it myself, in any period, Please, no.

For all their infamous raiding and plundering, the Vikings who attacked from Scandinavia might have been just a
bunch of lonely-hearted bachelors

Those must have been exciting times, although having just watched "Blood of the Clans" on TV, they would have been best advised to steer clear of Scotland!

Most members of Gransnet are women – although we do have some grandpas. Being a women was not good in the past for a hugely long time with little freedom of choice if you came from a rich family, little opportunity if you were poor.

I’ve always wanted to go back in time and go to The Great Exhibition. So I suppose that’s when I’d have to live. I often have to remind myself that everyone living in the past thought that they had advanced from the people that had lived before them. That their time was modern and new. I’m sure that at the time of the Great Exhibition many things were new and exciting and the possibilities for the future were endless.

It's easy to have a nostalgic, romantic view of life in the past. Especially, the way it's portrayed in films on TV.

In reality, there was so much suffering, though. Child mortality, filthy living conditions, back breaking work, no NHS, plagues and famines - so, no thanks (not enjoying the current plague either).