Friday, December 9, 2022

A crisp and beautiful sunrise in a fairly clear sky

Today was another beautiful sunrise and just minus 6 degrees celsius. A dusting of snow or maybe just frost on the ground as we await winter. So much of the sky is visible now from my work window. And there are soft fluffy clouds sitting above the stark branches of the trees. It is another beautiful December day waiting patiently for the snows to come. 

Yesterday great accomplishment on the matches and I have less than half to go. I am looking forward to the phasing routine once again especially working on the great grandparents. I do not know if I will learn anything that I do not already know but it will be a colourful picture of the inheritance by five siblings from their eight great grandparents. It will also be an easier look at matches which I am beginning to think are somewhat constricted by the lack of first cousins but autosomal DNA really only begins to flow outward when the results of 2nd and 3rd cousins flow in unless of course you have a lot of first cousins perhaps. Not being in that state I can not really say. 

Although I was very much a loaner as a child, I think as an adult having so many siblings is actually fun and I also enjoyed having my siblings as a child. Some of them I have not seen in twenty years and not likely that I will see them again in this lifetime but looking back on the years that we have been here and going back and forth to where I lived as a child some of my strongest memories of our big family have been those parties celebrating my parent's birthdays/anniversaries and my sibling's fourtieth birthdays (my mother always did fourty presents on each one of her children's birthdays). The twenty years of my childhood (before I married) went very quickly in my memory and there have been fifty seven years in my life since then. We have lived in this area for 47 years and in this house for 44 and a half years. Edward and the girls did go house hunting many many years ago now up on the hill but did not find one that they liked at that time and we just never really looked again. I am content here; always was.

So today another effort on the matches to see if I can bring them down to just a quarter left or perhaps less. The clustering has proven to be an interesting experiment blending the results into my phasing efforts. My Heritage often has partial trees with the match and I do make the effort when it looks to be possible of working those trees back in time to see if a common ancestor can be located. Amazing how many of my cousins remain in England but perhaps even more amazing how widespread around the world they are - throughout the present day British Commonwealth for the most part although some in the United States. Compared to my husband's results though with his deep colonial American ancestry I have very few actual cousins of 5th cousin to 2nd cousin in the United States - they have mostly moved to Commonwealth countries. 

Glory to Ukraine as always; prayers that Russia leaves Ukraine soon and doesn't continue to live in their dream world that the people in four areas of Ukraine actually voted in favour of becoming part of Russia. What a travesty that was for sure. 

On to breakfast and I have raisins for my cereal once again; I did miss the raisins. Nothing like a bowl of hot steaming oatmeal porridge first thing in the morning. 

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