Saturday, January 7, 2023

Too bad- once again the news cycle has been seized by a very jealous person

Still not going to read the book "Spare" but one doesn't need to do so since it appears to have become the current news cycle.  How sad for King Charles to have to live through all of this debacle with his Coronation coming in the spring. On the other hand it will be out of the way - it sounds like Harry has mostly ticked off a huge portion of the peoples of the United Kingdom. He comes off sounding like a whining younger child in a family just wanting his own way and resenting his older brother having it all. He himself claims not to want the "Fishbowl" existence of the Royal Family but keeps trying to present himself as better than they are. The Royal Family protects its own I think and they do it well; outliers end up being shunned which will likely be the fate of Harry and his family as they drop further and further down the line of succession to the throne. One wonders how he lives with himself as he demonstrates his jealousy of his older brother in such a destructive way (but apparently profitable). What happens in a family should really stay in a family unless criminal laws are broken. A fist fight is really nothing between brothers and Charles comes out of this as a really good father - protecting his elder son from the jealousy of a younger son but trying to make Harry feel that he too is protected by him. Harry is blind to the goodness in his family - what has blinded him? 

Working on my geni tree. I created it nearly ten years ago thinking to flesh out the Knight family of my great grandmother Maria Jane Knight - I could see it partially through DNA matches but life got in the way and I never really got back to that tiny tree of my father and his parents but with 400 merges in my tree it has blossomed and links together in a meaningful way all of those Knight-Butt-Arnold autosomal DNA matches - Maria Jane (Knight) Blake's parents were Samuel Knight and Louisa Butt; Samuel's parents were Ellis Knight and Eleanor Knight (likely 2nd cousins) and Louisa's parents were Charles Butt and Hannah Arnold. All of these individuals came from large families in what I call the Winterbourne Valley of Dorset and as far away as Milton Abbas but as I discovered these places are very close together when Edward and I visited with my cousin Ivan way back in 2008. Driving through the Winterbourne area was absolutely spectacular; it was a wonderful time. Being with my Blake cousins was also a fascinating experience. We, my six siblings and I, do not have any first cousins. We do have a few second cousins and half second cousins and likely thousands of third cousins and so it goes on. Ivan was my second cousin; his grandfather William Thomas Blake was the youngest brother of my grandfather Samuel George Blake with Samuel born in 1875 and William (always known as Bill to my father) born in 1894 and he was ten years older than my father and 19 years younger than Samuel. Pictures of Blake family members were shared and named which was very important as in 2008 I had just my memories to name those pictures but Ivan had actually seen all of those people so we shared a great correspondence for about twenty years. When I first looked at the tree as it had blossomed I did find a number of areas which I did modify and added a number of pictures; I wondered if the best way to handle this tree was to delete it and upload a new gedcom but then I would lose all of those connections carefully made by mostly third and fourth cousins. Instead I will just continue putting in some time to correct any errors and learn more about my Knight-Butt-Arnold families. Thank you to all the contributors. It will take me time to make any changes but I will do it cautiously and with love because these people are my kin living around the world who have added greatly to the knowledge of these three families (Knight-Butt-Arnold). Now if I could just rearrange errors or delete obviously incorrect people! I have an extra sibling born before my mother was born and when my father was 15 but they are stated to be his parents - how to get rid of that one is a question. I did write to the individual and tell them where they fitted into my family - the individual is actually a descendant of my great grandmother Grace (Gray) Pincombe's older sister Margaret (Gray) Tuckey who died in childbirth leaving a daughter Margaret Alice Tuckey born 16 Mar 1857 in London Township, Middlesex County, Upper Canada and died as the wife of Charles William Tomlinson 23 Jan 1892 in Ellington Township, Tuscole County, Michigan, USA (they had eight children and there are a lot of descendants in the United States). Why this unnamed descendant (his line is given coming down from Laurence Elbert Tomlinson (third child)) would be placed as a child of Ernest Edward George Blake and Helen Louise Pincombe is beyond me for sure! At 77 I do have to watch myself not to make mistakes but I do correct them if I do. I did try to delete but could not which is really strange. Accuracy is important.

Orthodox Christmas is being celebrated around the world but most meaningful for the Ukrainians who have lost so much this past year. As I read through the comments apparently made by military bloggers in Russia I wonder how they can be so naive and ignorant of the suffering of the Ukrainian people. Why do the Russians not insist that their government get out of Ukraine - how can they possibly believe they have a right to attack a free and sovereign nation the way that they have for a trumped-up excuse that was meant to hide greed for land and wealth of Ukraine? The people of Russia who support this war against Ukraine are Nazis - that is the definition that we, in the world, have given to Nazis - usurpers, murders, robbers, rapists and so many more words that describe a people bereft of humane qualities that we associate with Homo sapiens - the glue that binds us all together on this planet. Show your humaneness Russia and get out of Ukraine. People who do not want to be part of Ukraine should go back to Russia and leave the Ukrainians to their land; their lives and the lives especially of their children that the Russians are murdering. Russians have been murdering Ukrainians for a century now; time to stop.

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