Friday, November 30, 2018

Jury Duty

On the 3rd of December I have been summoned for Jury Duty. I have never done this in my entire life and would be quite excited to do so. But my husband's health, much improved, still concerns me and I hate to leave him alone even for a few hours in the day. I have decided to just wait and see how it goes. If I am needed then I will serve; if not, then we can continue with our renovations just a little bit at a time. Ed is strong but he needs to watch that he does not over do it.

Emails down to 318 which is amazing in itself. There was a lot of filing to do and quite a few do need a response but will work away at that as we renovate. I am busy removing wall paper and then we will get a painter to come in and do the painting. We have new floors on the main level which are really quite nice. We are enjoying them after 40 years with the green rug. Never would have believed that a rug could last that long but it was surprisingly intact when the workers removed it. Now we need to put everything back but are doing some rearranging to suit our aging selves!

My new phone is great - it warns me that a call may be a scammer. I generally use it for text only and ignore any calls that are unidentified. Ignore any texts for that matter if I do not recognize the name.

Best way to reach me is email; I generally look at all of them even the scam just to ensure that it is actually scam.

Wednesday, November 28, 2018

Emails now at 1800

We had a scheduled trip where it wasn't really practical to work on my emails so they have now ballooned to 1800. Over the next couple of days I must come up with a constructive plan to look at all of them, file them or delete them. Hopefully anyone waiting for an email will soon receive one!

We enjoyed our eight days away though and had lots of good family time. At 73 my extra curricular activities managed to increase these past few months. However, I am very much enjoying them but must learn to schedule in my emails.

Good news by this evening I have managed to whittle the emails down to 664. I just simply have not been deleting as I usually do. Too much traveling and we have settled in for a while once again. 

Tuesday, November 27, 2018

Traveling

My husband and I have done a lot of traveling the last twenty years and in particular the last ten years by air. Today we were coming home and our flight at the origin was delayed by 45 minutes. We arrived in Toronto for our flight to Ottawa with just one hour to spare and needed to go through customs. It was all set up we were directed to an agent and then from there we were directed once again to the shuttle as we were at another terminal than the one that we had arrived at. We amazingly arrived at our correct gate with 30 minutes to spare. I was indeed impressed with the way that our airport and customs agents managed to smoothly move us through all the processes needed to get us onto our Ottawa flight. There were a number of us needing to reach that Ottawa flight and so there were a lot of happy customers waiting for that Ottawa flight.

Sunday, November 11, 2018

1200 emails

I had not thought to get myself into this difficulty again but I have 1200 emails to either file, answer and or discard hopefully. I really hadn't noticed that I was so far behind with all the gardening and renovating that we have been doing the past year. It will take a bit of time to sort through all of them.

The reason I noticed was a note that I had made to myself back in 2012 which suddenly appeared when I was sorting through some actual paper material. When my husband was awarded a medal in 2012 I had asked for support letters from a number of people. I had managed to thank all of the people except for one. I couldn't find his email at the time. I located it  right away this time but in the process the size of my Inbox suddenly came to my attention.

I did indeed write the thank you letter (I hope it wasn't too short but began to wonder when I received a much longer note back). I decided I had not perhaps been chatty enough so composed a reply with lots of newsy items. Now to get on with the 1200 emails in my Inbox.

I do have this dreadful tendency to write emails and maybe back and forth a few times and then the correspondence fades from my memory. I have convinced myself that people are really busy and would not have expected me to continue with the correspondence anyway. With six siblings, eleven nieces and nephews my correspondence can become quite busy so just letting my readers know that I value all the emails that are sent to me and if you do not hear from me for a while after writing back to me feel free to send me another one.

Tuesday, November 6, 2018

Trans Mountain Pipeline

I really think that the acquisition of the Trans Mountain Pipeline will be one of the best things that Prime Minister Trudeau and his government have done for Canada. I am still hoping that the First Nations will take on this project with their usual efficient management and make this a paying investment for the First Nations. I listened a while back to one of the Chiefs mentioning that they would think of this as a fifty year plan whereby they would use the money made from the Pipeline (and its proposed expansion) to invest in renewable energy so that eventually the renewable project will be the paying investment for the First Nations and they can retire the Trans Mountain Pipeline. First Nations have the knowledge of the land and the dedication to the land to see that there are no spills. They are willing to put in the long hours that are needed to ensure that this pipeline is effectively managed to their benefit and to the land of their birth as well. A happy and prosperous First Nations is a benefit to themselves but also a benefit to Canada.

In just two short months the First Nations have rebuilt the Railway between Winnipeg and Churchill and with them managing the running and the maintenance I am sure that the benefits will be enormous. Churchill will become an even more important port than it is now as global warming decimates the ice in the north. Whether that is a good thing or not; the prediction is that this port will eventually be open year round. Shipping our grain to this port to sell it around the world will greatly benefit our farming areas in the west.

Monday, November 5, 2018

H11 Newsletter, Volume 2, Issue 4

                                                  H11 Newsletter - Volume 2, Issue 4, 2018
Table of Contents
1.    FT DNA – mitochondrial DNA tree
2.    FT DNA Project
3.    Project Statistics
4.    Phylotree
5.    Changes in how a project administrator can view your results

1.    FT – DNA mitochondrial (Mt) DNA tree

FT DNA has now provided the Mt-DNA Haplotree on their homepage. Scroll down to the bottom of the homepage and under Community you find a link to this site.

For the H11 mitochondrial line navigate starting at the top working down from L0 to L123456 to L23456 to L2346 to L346 to L34 to L3 to N to R branch and moving to R0. Then expand and choose HV and expanding it choose H and there are 976 branches under H. Go right to the bottom and choose H-T195C! and expand it. Then choose H11 which has 16 branches under it. At this point, I followed my own branch H11a2a1 and will demonstrate as follows:

Choose H11a with 13 branches. The variety of countries at this level is large:
Germany 54, Ireland 34, England 30, USA 27, Sweden 21, Scotland 14, United Kingdom 11, Poland 10, France 8, Finland 8, Canada 7, Norway 6, Italy 5, Czech Republic 4, and Austria 3.
H11a expands and choose H11a2. There are four more branches under H11a2 and expanding gives H11a2a and it has three branches beneath it. Expanding gives H11a2a1 which is my haplogroup with countries being:
 USA 14, England 14, Ireland 10, Scotland 10, United Kingdom 7, Germany 4, Canada 3, Northern Ireland 2, and Wales 1.
This, one would surmise, is a predominantly British Isles group.

My maternal grandmother was born in Birmingham, England and her mother was also said to be born in Birmingham, England. My closest matches tend to be Northern Ireland or South-west Scotland (namely Argyllshire or Ayrshire). I have communicated with several of the USA members (four to be exact) of this group and they were descendant of a group from Country Antrim who traveled with the Rev William Martin in 1772 to the Carolina Colony. Some members of this group were descendant of Planters from Argyllshire/Ayrshire sent to Northern Ireland by Cromwell in the 1600s. The descendants in the United States tend to refer to this group as Scot-Irish.
The nomenclature for my line is H11a2a1.

The results for country of origin given above are interesting - they total 65 individuals within the FT DNA database that have agreed to have their results used in a research project. Of that group of 65, there are only 17 in this research project (26%) so I must admit that I am perhaps not really adding much to knowledge of this haplogroup with such a small representation in the study.

Of the group in the H11 project there are:
USA 9, England 3, Ireland 2, Scotland 0, United Kingdom 1, Germany 0, Canada 2, Northern Ireland 0, and Wales 0.

I happen to know 2 of the members from England are my brother and myself. All of these individuals are listed in my matches one might think and indeed I have 105 matches between 0 and 3 steps away. I consider 3 steps away to not even be meaningful looking at mitochondrial DNA and actually even 2 steps away does not really entice me to look at the match. I have 1 at a genetic distance of 0 and 23 at a genetic distance of 1. I had not really thought to look at this before. All of the 105 matches belong to H11a2a1 which means to me that only 62% have agreed to have their results used in a research project. Of the 23 that are a genetic distance of 1, 20 have taken the Family Finder Test. None of these 20 individuals match me on Family Finder.

The 23 matches to me are a genetic distance of 1 meaning that our common ancestor could be a thousand years ago or more. That does tell me that although the number of people who agree to be part of the research project is only 62%; there isn't likely anyone that is related to me in a reasonable time frame in this group of matches.

Looking at DNA Painter there are 13 individuals who share a length of DNA on Chromosome 23 with me. Of this group of 13 only two share greater than 15 cM on Chromosome 23 hence I do not really look at this particular set of matches unless they are sharing larger amounts on other chromosomes.
Other members of the group may find more success with their H11 subclade.

2.    FT DNA Project:
There are now 317 members in our H11 project. Full sequence results are completed on 277 members of the group. Interestingly 220 members of this group have also done Family Finder. Unfortunately it is not possible to visually look at the Family Finder results as that would compromise the privacy of individuals. However, you can look at your matches in Family Finder.

3.    Project Statistics (yDNA statistics removed):
Combined GEDCOMs Uploaded        49
DISTINCT mtDNA Haplogroups        16
Family Finder       220
Genographic 2.0 Transfers         20
Maternal Ancestor Information       269
mtDNA            288
mtDNA Full Sequence        277
mtDNA Plus        285
mtDNA Subgroups          22
Total Members        317
Unreturned Kits          12

4.    The latest release of the phylotree used by FT DNA was dated 18 Feb 2016:
H11 breakdown in the PhyloTree mt:







Within the study group we have members in every sub-haplogroup except H11a5 (and it can be seen in the chart above that the mutation C15040T marks this subgrouping). I have written to Dr van Oven several times but he is likely too busy to respond. H11 is a very small subclade of H. In time, he may have time to review H11 once again as I have created more subclades within the breakdown he currently he has for the H11 project. I will not do any of this new expansion in this newsletter but hope to look at that for the next issue when, hopefully, more members of the project have given me permission to look at their presumed/known country of origin.
http://www.phylotree.org/tree/R0.htm *

*van Oven M, Kayser M. 2009. Updated comprehensive phylogenetic tree of global human mitochondrial DNA variation. Hum Mutat 30(2):E386-E394. http://www.phylotree.org.
doi:10.1002/humu.20921

5.    Changes in how a project administrator can view your results
FT DNA has upgraded their access to accounts so that the default is Group Access only. If you wish to have your results included in the project then you must grant Limited Access to the Administrator.

Any submissions to this newsletter can be submitted to Elizabeth Kipp (kippeeb@rogers.com).