Interesting work on 6000 year old DNA in North Africa

 Reading an interesting post on 6000 year old DNA which was primarily 80% North African and 20% Mesopotamian. It is conjectured that movement out of Africa began 60,000 years ago but the numbers would have been small groups of hunter gatherers probably but we are also looking at a time when agriculture began in Mesopotamia. Fascinating research being done with DNA. I often wonder if the collected samples of Western Hunter Gatherers in the British Isles would get published one day. That being my Blake family line it is rather interesting to me. That my grandfather when he talked about his family described them as having been in the Andover for ever quite fascinating. When one looks at the yDNA in the area from Andover over to Basingstoke the frequency of Western Hunter Gatherer yDNA in the families is apparent. Why they would settle in this area is interesting but on our couple of trips in the area the land is very fertile and somewhat flat with good streams flowing through so one could see the attraction to stop and settle there. If indeed they were one of the Lost Tribes of Israel then there would have been a lot of peace in that area I suspect after all they went through in the south. I still am amazed at how much he talked about is there in writeups and discussed by genealogists regarding the work of Horatio Gates Somerby and the fraudulent histories of families that he produced for his American clients Blake being amongst them. But now in 2026 looking back on my childhood before my grandfather died in 1953 (although my father also, on occasion, did chat about it) and that is a period of 73 years ago that I sat and listened to my grandfather talk about the past. His stories went so far back because his great grandfather Charles Butt was still alive when he was a child and Charles was born in 1800. He talked and he talked and amazingly as I think back his stories do come to me as he repeated them so many times. It is amazing to have a feel for that much history in terms of times past. 

Finished the cleaning yesterday and another work week ahead of me with four days to do research. I did almost complete the matches up to the end of the G's yesterday but I am still scratching the surface. There are a lot of matches. I spent some time looking at my spam just to see if I had missed anything the last couple of weeks but no; no missing messages in there. I actually do not get that much spam compared to the mail that comes into my mailbox.  

Today will be a busy one and the sun is streaming through the window at the moment. I love it when the hot sun in the winter beats down on the back of the house. You can feel the heat that it sends in but it is just minus 9 degrees celsius today at 8:00 a.m. so the deep freeze is gone for a bit but could return; one never knows. The Polar Vortex has a mind of its own. 

I actually have results now for two of the four great grandparent lines in the common area which is good news. It is this common area where as much as one third of the matches sit and I have eliminated a number of them because I did not collect quite enough information when I was downloading from 23 and Me. At the beginning I did not always note the close matches to that match and I can no longer access my two brother's accounts because they are deceased and I just haven't jumped through the hoops to get that set up. It is a process but I should have brought them into my account but didn't realize it at the time so a lesson learned for sure. But mostly I have other matches with siblings that offset that loss. 

I still have to look at all the testing companies as I have not collected any new material for about six months. I have glanced and nothing huge came in but still some of the matches will likely be interesting. I do want to get started on the genealogical charts for the two books though and hope to do that early in April is the plan. 

First set of exercises completed and I must have done a lot of extra walking as the cardio load was 51 and the time 1 hour and four minutes. I will do weight lifting at some point and running for thirty minutes. Back to that normal set of exercises for the rest of the week where the weight lifting is interchanged with rowing generally and hopefully some yoga. The days pass so very quickly. 

Drinking tea and time to do the solitaire puzzles. I am now an Ace in the Sudoku puzzle set up. I wonder what is next.  

And the basement is cleaning day three

Prayer for the souls of the people murdered in Tumbler Ridge, BC. Information still coming. 

 Yesterday the cleaning went very well and was accomplished mostly before lunch which was good as the Fit Bit is now starting to recognize the cleaning and I am receiving reasonable numbers for this work.The duration 3 hours and 12 minutes, the cardio load 92 and the calories burned 1169. My last old Fit Bit had  higher numbers which I never really felt were correct. I am satisfied that this fits the effort that I put in. So today the basement and the robot will begin its task shortly. 

I continue to contemplate how to update Canada Post to virtual mailboxes as I consider Canada Post to be a valuable service which at the moment needs a redo I think in order to take up more of the possible package deliveries in particular (more money being received by the Post Office) and to help offset the cost to the government mailing items to us where there is a cost (all hard copies would have to be paid for both the printing and the cost of delivery). I think it would result in Canada Post being able to support itself. Plus it guarantees package mail delivery all over Canada without exception.  As mentioned yesterday the beginnings of virtual mailboxes are already there with the postal code which is in two parts - the area code the first three items ( a letter a number followed by a letter) and then the location code (a number, a letter, a number) which brings it down to a group of households in an area. This just has to be subdivided into individual units and a particular code chosen by the unit owner can be used for this third category that actually lets you into the mailbox and can be changed regularly to prevent fraud with two factor authentication with your phone and email just for extra layers. That gives it enormous flexibility into the future. Fascinating really but it will take time to implement although we should speed things up so that they are not so slow really. We need to speed ourselves up. I would suggest that the electronic flyers that would be distributed by Canada Post into the virtual mailboxes would carry the same cost as the current distribution of paper flyers by Canada Post. This system will be expensive to setup but the main attributes of the system are consistent across all departments of the Government and everyone will benefit particularly on a mercantile basis and that will help to ensure the Post Office being in the black rather than the red. Enough on the Post Office; just my thoughts at this time for whatever reason; sometimes I am just annoyed about something and being the person I am I begin to think of good solutions. 

Working on Chromosome 1 and yesterday I managed to complete the D's. A few good insights that solved some great grandparent lines and I will continue with that today. It is really the common area (common to Europe and the British Isles (and by extension a lot of the people in the Western Hemisphere except for the First Nations)) that is the most difficult to separate into the great grandparent line very often. But there are still probably 200 matches to go or more. I will count them when there are fewer. 

I have now organized the recycling that has been added to our collecting to put out to the street. I put all the small plastic items into one of the bread bags, another bread bag will hold the large pieces of plastic and I use very few cans and the  number of large plastic containers has almost completely disappeared with the purchase of the boxes of liquid hand cleaner and soap that I bought from a company in Montreal. I replaced the cleaning solution with a paper product that comes in a recyclable cardboard box. The amazing thing is that there is only floss in the garbage and it will takes months and months to fill that plastic bag in the garbage container. Amazing really and a good move forward having a private company take over the recycling collection. 

I want to start on the enormous set of excel files for the photo books so that I have created just the family part of it and then I can begin setting up the photo books. The other way was not working for me as I just felt sad about taking apart the History of his Life that Edward created. It will still be there in the scanned files along with the original indexes. One day a descendant might just pull that up and have a look at it; one never knows. But it was something Edward did not want to happen that he would be forgotten as he always felt his father was. Definitely our daughters will never forget their father; they loved him dearly and still do. 

Time to do the solitaire puzzles and I have forgotten my tea so must go and do that.  

Second Day of Cleaning

 First day of cleaning went very well but it is on these three days that I have to really work to get to my 12,000 steps per day (just over 13,000 yesterday) - I seldom go beyond that on a cleaning day. I primarily concentrate on my books when not working and getting them done. Whenever life becomes conflicting it does appear that I hide behind my books. The books will be published with a Creative Common License and free on my website. The Blake will be a shorter volume than the actual one that I will produce but I still feel strongly that I will not be adequately proving to my mind anything prior to 1521 and will not include that portion in the published online book but it will be in the book that I place in the Guild of one-name Studies Library where I am a member. I will get some of the material transcribed (it is all in Latin) but I do not have all of it and so I must leave it to a scholar in the future who finds the story of the Blake Family of Andover intriguing. Perhaps another descendant of that family will do that. I have a busy couple of months ahead of me of work although I do not plan to publish before January 2028. Once I complete Chromosome 1 then I will be changing how I am working and back into planned days for either Blake or Pincombe. It will be exciting and I will enjoy it. 

I continued yesterday to contemplate the Cosmic Horizon and Heaven. I do believe God is in the Heavens and the discussion was most interesting that I read yesterday. I do not believe I have ever heard it expressed in quite that way before (past Lecturer at Harvard, Dr. Michael Guillen, The Economic Times). It was absolutely beautiful and thank you to him for sharing it with the world. I still remember the first time I saw a print of an atom; it was just a flat image on a paper but I loved the look of it. It so appealed to me and drew me into Chemistry at a young age (about twelve as I was headed off to High School). I read Chemistry for years before I studied it and still find  it fascinating. The atom is the secret; it is the basis of all that we see around us including ourselves. DNA is built from atoms and in the creation of a life at every level DNA responds to the material it receives from each parent accepting the best presented and rejecting the inferior. That doesn't mean as we all know that everyone is born perfect. I myself had strabismus all my life until I was 78 years of age and then like a miracle I could see into the depths like I never did before. I could see without glasses and even more astounding I passed my driver's test without glasses. I notice that now nearly two years later I do not reach for my glasses first thing in the morning that did take a while. But it is all the mystery of the atom how our life flows and will we ever know when the atom first appeared in this universe. Genesis is a simple story of the beginning but I think that the atom is all part of that story. The secret of the Cosmos never to be revealed whilst one is living. But we can dream about it.

Another good day of morning exercise at 58 minutes, cardio load of 51 and 339 calories plus 2615 steps which is about right for that set of exercises. I injured my back in a fall in my mid-teen years and I got up and walked again so never really investigated it (I was one of seven children after all) but I still have to be careful with my back as it is easily put into difficulty without the proper exercise. I did finally in my 60s get some help with my back and some good exercise recommendations. That is one of the many reasons that I do do exercises every day to keep my back very strong. 

Still none of my expected  mail and mostly what I do receive is all brochures (and that could be virtual as well saving one's time looking for it online). Canada Post is particularly good at delivering bulk mail. Perhaps not a big deal getting my piece of awaited mail as I can just call the company; I already paid my premium (this is insurance for my burial so do like to keep it up to date). But I do like to have the paperwork. I dream of a virtual mail box and we are setup already with the filing system for it with the postal code (the two parts of that postal code were particularly ingenious). I actually did work for the Postal Service in one of the District Offices back when I was having a problem with miscarriage from being on my feet all my working day and needed to rest so I went to work at the Post Office and with my COBOL language did manage to secure an interesting position but I was taken ill after my daughter was born and had to leave my position. Having the postal code would make a very straightforward setup and we could move to it quickly. I have had so many different kinds of jobs in my life all emanating from the various trainings that I have had in school, in the workplace and just on my own usually online learning once that entered into our lives.  I do not know if there would be initial savings as the added computer setup, the electricity, the use of AI (still in training stages and will be awhile before it would be ready without a lot of human input). But the advantage is so huge and I believe it would increase the income earned by the Post Office because it would be a do it all delivery service for government and mercantile as they choose providing everything particularly delivery of parcels which they are quite excellent at providing (parcels would grow of course because of items that the government delivers to us which were once letter mail - for actual hard copy delivered perhaps we would pay for that in the future); but for the consumer/tax payer/business being able to handle your mail anywhere in the world is a plus. We have a bit of that already as you can get the post office to scan your mail and send it to you. That is an interesting mid step but for privacy the virtual mailbox wins out absolutely. 

At the District Office of the Post Office in the middle of the large room there on the second floor where I worked were maybe a dozen desks of men who had served in the Second World War and had been injured in various ways and they formed a work pool that we could get to do particular tasks and one in particular was very keen on computers and I got him to prepare the huge piles of computer pages by marking particular items for me. He became extremely good at it and fast. I admired those young men in the height of their youth (well I suppose in their 40s and 50s then) pushing themselves day after day to work and to learn. They could  have just sat back and given up but they did not and I will forever remember them for their courage to keep going and continue doing what they could do to support themselves and their families.  

Worked on Chromosome 1 yesterday and I am into the D's so not a great deal done yesterday. But some good sorting of the common area with lots of Relative lists attached to the files now. AI can do all that work for me eventually. But for the moment I must prepare my files removing any randomness so that the AI will do the best job that I can tell it to do with minimum junk coming out. 

Tea all drank and solitaire puzzles to do. I have one neat trick that I use when my back is a problem and that is to kneel at the computer and type and play solitaire puzzles. It does seem to strengthen the back.  

 

 

Cleaning day One

An ever repeating sequence in my life is cleaning days. I do not mind cleaning it reminds me of my grandmother teaching me how to clean and I do try to follow her clear instructions. Life has changed though and now at 80 I do do things somewhat differently. She was a fascinating person though and my memories of her are very strong and clear in my mind. She managed though to say only certain things about her families leaving one to wonder many times. I wonder if she visited the area of Bermondsey where her great grandfather Christopher Buller had his Slop Shop on Tooley Street in Bermondsey. We were on the tour bus when I was looking out the window as we drove across the Thames from London and I just happened to glance up at the right time to see the street marker with Tooley Street upon it. Generally I can not read those signs but it was a large sign and the bus was right beside it and of course one is sitting up higher in a tour bus with huge windows. That was our first trip to London in 2008 (my husband and I). I had been in London in 2001 with my oldest daughter when we did my pilgrimage to Rome and then a side trip to London on our way home to Canada.  I had asked Edward first if he would like to come but he declined although he regretted that after our Tour of Europe as he saw little of Italy compared to what I had seen with my older daughter. He always wanted to go back and do a trip of just Italy. But once he went and enjoyed it he wanted to go much more often than I did. I wanted to see everything that I could see so it took a good six months to prepare for each trip and so it was generally every second year that we went. 

My grandmother did mention all of her grandparents - the Taylor grandparents were shoe makers/shop keepers and the Buller grandmother lived with her children except not their family. Henry Christopher Buller, her grandfather, had died twenty six years before she was born. My grandmother attended her grandmother's funeral not long before her father died actually and she had met her father's sisters at that time. Both of her parents had come from fairly large families. But Buller is one of my challenging lines which I will have a longer look at after the Pincombe and Blake books are completed. 

 I worked on Chromosome 1 yesterday and managed to get through to the C's. The number of matches is huge so it will be a while getting through this chromosome. However, some of the dust has settled on the common area as I was able to prepare a good list of matches for Buller and Blake as well as Pincombe (my Rawlings matches are very few actually overall but the ones that I do have are close so good coverage). 

The start of the work week is always interesting and today it is minus 24 degrees celsius with a wind chill of minus 35 to minus 40 degrees celsius. So a very cold day out there and I believe I will just look at the snow from a distance whilst I clean. The desire to go out in that is pretty weak. I did put the skis away until March when I might ski again - time and the snow will decide that. 

On the first chromosome at the beginning there are quite a few matches (as many as 40 actually but I did not collect all of them) that are early Colonial American and in the Blake/Knight line. I am still trying to find a match that will reveal which of the two. There is also a length on this same chromosome that is definitely Blake and both ancient and  modern so again I wonder are these the descendants of the Sedgewick family where Joanna Blake married Robert Sedgewicke  the 6th of Jan 1634 (old style) at Andover St Marys in Hampshire, England. Earlier in the history of Ancestry DNA I did collect five or six matches that were small but traced back to Sedgewicke (I do need to pull them up as I saved them when Ancestry removed the very small matches from their database). I will spend some time looking at these matches when I am doing the genealogy charts. Some really good lengths of Buller on this chromosome especially with my two Buller cousins testing recently (descendants of Clement Charles Caswell Buller (brother to my Edwin Denner Buller) and I already have two other descendants of siblings of my great grandfather Edwin Denner Buller so an interesting length of this chromosome is known to me along with two descendants of the Welch family which was the mother of Edwin Denner Buller. Not quite as large but in a significant place which has aided the investigation quite a bit from an earlier time. But the addition of the last two was memorable as it solved the problem on Chromosome 3 for sure. I do have eighteen known matches but this is a very long chromosome and there are spots (particularly the common area where more Known matches would be nice). Although time is providing answers that weren't there earlier. 

 Time is moving onward and I must finish off my tea and do my solitaire puzzles before breakfast and then cleaning. Exercises completed and a snack to fortify me until breakfast. Another beautiful day on God's world. An interesting discussion on the location of Heaven which I found very thought consuming. The scientist who discussed it is a physicist. I loved studying physics because so many of the early scholars were very religious and constantly brought science and religion together. I have always felt that the examination of the atom revealed God to us as it is so perfect and designed in a fundamental way that does make one believe very deeply in the presence of God in our world. Randomness doesn't cut it with me mostly because randomness is chaotic and destructive and the atom is perfect because it follows a logical course that is beneficial not destructive like plants and animals where the best combination of DNA is always chosen. 

 

Continuing blog - I am verbose today

 The only time that I have gone to a neighbour's door for help in my life was my car was stuck. It wasn't stuck in terms of ice or anything but I was backing it out of the garage and I did not seem to be able to manage it for some odd reason. I must admit I was getting concerned about my eyes at that stage but they had said I didn't need cataract surgery yet, But it just seemed that I wasn't seeing as well as I had been. So I did knock/ring the bell on the door next door just the one time to get help with that and they did back my car out of the garage. Which I said thank you for their assistance. My husband knew them well and they helped each other out when they were away or we were. I really didn't know them at all until my husband passed and then I did start speaking to them as my life was very busy helping my daughter and my son in law stayed in my house for half of a week with our youngest grandson as he needed assistance with his Autism (a very expensive process) so I did ask them to take in the mail which they did when I wasn't there but it was a short period of time. But mostly I keep entirely to myself except when my family is with me or I am with them. My daughters and son in law and grandchildren take good care of me. 

I am finding though that the mail is very slow these days; some items I am expecting have not arrived. It seems really strange and it again makes me feel that virtual mailboxes would be so much better. All of these companies can produce electronic documents that the post office can distribute. It would be so much neater and no waste of paper. Even though my black bin was not emptied this week in two weeks it will barely have anymore than is in there now but with virtual I would have almost nothing and only need collecting every month or two. I simply do not use a lot of products. I never get parcels at the door as I do not buy anything except when family is here and we go shopping. But the Post Office would actually have a bigger business in parcel delivery if the mailboxes were virtual (especially in the country as well where everything could be delivered closer to home). Mind you I do not think the Post Office has to make money. It is a service to the public but it could be close to supporting itself with bulk mailing for business in a virtual way and delivery service for both government and mercantile. The number of in house workers and delivery van drivers would grow to offset the loss in jobs that a virtual system would entail. Running a virtual system requires management and workers along with AI.  

I am also trying to reduce the plastic waste and metal from cans. I seldom open a can so that isn't very much but when my daughter is here we do have more cans. Plastic is a slow process as there are meat containers but I am thinking of switching to a butcher that only uses butcher paper to wrap the meat and just go more often when I have someone with me. My daughter found this company that makes a product in a Canadian cardboard box with a thin plastic container that is larger than I used to buy and that reduces the plastic somewhat but still there. I guess we need to go to powders but still you need a container but if it is cardboard which we produce a lot of then that does reduce the waste of plastic. We switched to powder for clothes washing and that is in a tin container which recycles very well much better than plastic (such knowledge from my own days in Chemistry at University). I usually have very little in the blue container but it has increased since we recycle all of the plastic freezer bags now. 

I have had a large white plastic bag in my garbage for two weeks now and all it has in it is floss and it will take years to fill it with floss. The used kleenex is in a paper bag and goes out with the recycling along with the food waste which I put into used milk cartons (waxed cardboard) and freeze until the day of pickup. Again I only fill one of the 2 litre cartons once a week when I am on my own. When I have company I use the paper recycling bags not biodegradable plastic because we make the paper bags here in Canada. 

Interesting really where all of that is going. I am verbose today but that  happens when I am awake in the night contemplating how to solve whatever the current problem is. I may have a solution that I will work through over the next couple of days. I did find it inadequate to be told to just go to the store and set it up when I tried to set up a system online that I have used many times in the past but it took my money but did not set up the system I needed. I went through this call system that finally got me a person after two hours nearly the other day and was told that he couldn't do the work even though I had the charge number against my credit card for the government department. I find that weird really as everything is online and surely he could see that I had paid but not received the setup required. But maybe not. I didn't care for his solution which was to trek out to the store and set it up there. Why would I do that when I should be able to just easily set it up on line as I always have. But I do have a workaround in mind once my money comes back - no one is  made of money to waste randomly trying to set something up. Plus I did  not get a response to my filling in the forms where you mention the problem. 

Having to change your work direction happens in life as my own husband graduated as a PhD Chemist and went on to do a Postdoc in Chemical Engineering as he wanted to be a working scientist not just an educated one. But no jobs as it was the time of the draft dodgers and they came north and took all the  jobs for a bit and our PhD graduates taught high school (many in his PhD graduating class did that in that time period). So he did yet another degree masters in library science and got a job that he worked at happily for thirty years so I do not really have a lot of sympathy. Retrain and get a different job if your job disappears due to automation or political circumstance. Plus I do need a new vacuum cleaner and I want it to be all Canadian like they used to be; I will feel the same way if I am buying a fan or any other electrical device that is no longer made here and we import them from the companies in the United States that bought our companies out or simply out competed them and they closed during free trade. Those American companies in some cases made their products off shore eventually more cheaply in Asia and that is where some of them come from now first coming through the US to here. So retrain and lets get our industries back sooner rather than later. The shop vac works well but I would like a new Canadian vacuum cleaner and especially one that doesn't sound like a jet engine taking off. 

Well must get some work done before church and eat my breakfast. The day is moving onward. The exercise this morning was excellent and it was 56 minutes (4 minutes faster than usual), 49 cardio load and 326 calories, step count 3306 which is still a little high as I did lose count a couple of time.  Yesterday I walked nearly 17,000 steps. I get up and walk every hour for about ten to fifteen minutes which does bring that count up rapidly plus I ran for thirty minutes and did weight lifting for 22 minutes.