Daily Survival: How My 3rd Great-Grandmother Has Lived for 237 Years

My third great-grandmother, my grandfather’s great-great-grandmother, was born in 1789, the same year George Washington took his first oath of office. She never saw an airplane or a refrigerator. She raised her children through cholera outbreaks and crop failures, buried more than one infant, and lived through winters where the difference between eating and starving came down to what she’d canned, dried, or smoked the season before.

She’s been gone for over a century now. And yet she is, in every sense that matters, still alive in our family today.

The skills she carried, the habits she drilled into her children, the quiet stubbornness that refused to let hardship win, all of it got passed down. Generation after generation, through epidemics, depressions, wars, and blackouts, someone in our family reached back into what she taught and used it to survive.

She built a lineage that couldn’t be starved out, frozen out, or scared into helplessness. That’s 237 years of her fingerprints on every generation that followed.

Her Son Learned to Heal With Herbs During the Cholera Years

Cholera tore through towns in waves during the 1830s, and doctors of the time had almost nothing to offer beyond bleeding a patient or telling the family to pray. Her son grew up watching his mother reach for her garden instead of a doctor’s bag.

She brewed bitter teas from herbs she grew and dried herself, treated fevers with what she could grow rather than what she could buy, and kept her family standing through outbreaks that emptied houses up and down the road. Her son learned every bit of it standing at her side, and by the time he had his own household, he didn’t panic when sickness came through. He already knew what to reach for.

Her Great-Granddaughter Carried the Garden Through the Great Depression

Her great-granddaughter grew up learning how to grow a garden that could feed a family through anything. She planned it around food that could be preserved, stretched, and stored through a hard winter.

Part of that plan was a small pond dug at the low end of the property, filled by runoff and lined with clay to hold water through the dry months. She stocked it with fish for food, but the pond did more than that. She used the water to irrigate the rows below it, running it through shallow trenches whenever the garden needed a drink. The fish waste settled into that water and fed the soil right along with the crops, though she never would have called it fertilizer. She just called it good water.

When the Depression hit and money disappeared overnight, that garden kept the family fed while neighbors stood in bread lines. She rotated crops the way she’d been taught, saved seeds every fall instead of buying new ones, and kept a root cellar stocked with potatoes, onions, and squash to carry them through to spring. The pond never ran dry, even in the worst stretches, because she’d built it to hold water when the sky wouldn’t.

What she was doing, without having a name for it, is something people now call Aquaponics. Fish and plants sharing the same water, each one feeding the other, no separate systems and no wasted resources.

Today you can build a version of that same setup in a backyard or even indoors, with a small tank and a grow bed doing exactly what her clay-lined pond did a hundred years ago.

Watch how Aquaponics works (plus a few tips for your own survival garden) in the video below:

Her Great-Great-Granddaughter Fed Six Kids Alone Through Wartime Rationing

By World War II, sugar, meat, and gasoline were rationed down to coupons, and grocery shelves thinned out fast. Her great-great-granddaughter, raising six kids alone while her husband was overseas, leaned on everything she’d grown up watching.

She kept a garden that did more work than the government’s victory-garden posters ever gave it credit for, packed tight with vegetables that could be canned, dried, or root-cellared.

She cured her own bacon and stretched a single hog through months instead of weeks. When sugar ran short, she taught her kids to take their tea and porridge with honey instead, a habit that stuck in the family long after rationing ended.

My Grandfather Used Her Water Lessons to Survive a Drought

A brutal drought hit the region in the 1950s, drying up wells and putting entire farms out of business. My grandfather remembered what generations before him had learned the hard way: how to dig a well by hand, how to catch and store rainwater off a roofline, how to ration water without anyone in the house feeling it too hard.

While other families trucked in water or gave up their land, our family got through on wells and rain barrels, using methods that had been passed down and refined for over a century. He used to say the family had always managed water instead of trusting it would always be there.

So, what skills did I learn from here? I learned that water reserves are not optional. Growing up, my family always had water stored in barrels. But pay attention here, because the barrels matter more than people think. Ours were white oak, and that wasn’t random. White oak has a tight grain that barely lets water seep through, and it doesn’t leach the tannins or bacteria that softer woods can. A cheap plastic barrel might hold water, but it won’t hold it clean for long.

Still, we wanted to move on with the times. Inspired by what she started all those generations ago, I went looking for something built for today, and that’s how I found the Forever Water Generator, a home version of the AWGs the military has used for years to pull clean drinking water straight from the air. Most of my family now keeps one running at home.

What surprised me was the cost. The creator behind it wanted it available to regular families, not just military budgets, so he released a DIY version anyone can build for the price of a large pizza with all the toppings. The parts run around 100 dollars, and once it’s built, it keeps producing water without needing a well, a pipeline, or rain.

The Lineage Reached Me Through Blackouts and Ice Storms

Her remedies never died with her. She wrote them down, and that handwritten book of cures has been copied, corrected, and passed from mother to daughter ever since. When COVID hit and I found myself taking care of my whole family, that book is what I reached for.

My niece was burning up with a fever of 103, pharmacies were picked clean, and getting a doctor on the phone took days. So I made her the family recipe we call the Soothing Elixir, a yarrow-based remedy with a few other ingredients; all native medicinal plants from our home state of North Carolina, where the Appalachian mountains grow more medicinal species than almost anywhere else in the country. Her fever broke overnight.

Inspired by my 3rd great-grandmother’s story, my own medicinal garden always has calendula, yarrow, chamomile, feverfew, and chicory growing in it, along with five other plants that go into the recipes every generation of this family has used to survive.

Don’t have a medicinal garden yet? Start yours ASAP with Dr. Nicole’s Medicinal Seed Kit. It has every plant I just named, ready to grow in any state and any soil.

The Lessons That Made It All the Way Down

A few things survived every generation intact, sharpened a little each time they got passed along.

Nothing gets thrown away until it’s proven useless twice. She raised her children to save jars, fabric scraps, nails, and string, not out of hoarding but out of respect for what things could still become.
A garden isn’t decoration, it’s insurance. Every woman in this family who kept a real garden, planned around preservation and not just fresh eating, fed her family through something that would have broken a household without one.
Medicine doesn’t always come from a pharmacy. Long before hospitals were reachable for most families, herbs from the garden treated what needed treating.
Water is never guaranteed, so you learn to manage it before you need to. Whether it was a hand-dug well or a rain barrel system, every generation added its own version of the same lesson.
A stocked pantry outlasts a stocked wallet. This one got repeated so often in our family it stopped sounding like advice and started sounding like a fact of nature.

Why She’s Still Here

You might be asking – how could someone born in 1789 matter to a family living in 2026? But she does, because everything she knew about surviving hard times still works. The world changed, the crises changed, and her skills never stopped being the answer. firsthand.

She never lived to see a single blackout that hit our family, never saw the drought my grandfather survived or the ice storms I weathered. But she prepared for all of it anyway, by making sure the knowledge outlived her. That’s the real definition of legacy. Not what you leave behind in a box, but what you leave behind in the people who come after you, ready to face whatever comes next the same way you did.

She lived to 110, outlasting almost everyone she ever taught, and she’s been gone for more than a century now. But every time someone in this family cans a jar of tomatoes, checks a rain barrel, or refuses to throw away something that might still be useful, she’s there. That’s how a woman born 237 years ago is still, in every way that counts, alive.

And I decided her knowledge shouldn’t stay locked inside one family. Skills like hers only survive if they keep getting passed on, so when the creators of this book I deeply respect asked me to contribute, I shared some of her secrets. These are the same remedies and methods that carried us through five generations of hard times. If she taught me anything, it’s that knowledge you keep to yourself dies with you.

CLICK HERE for a FREE sneak peek of the book and discover a few of her secrets for yourself.