Last day of the Paralympics

The last day of the Paralympics and Canada has done well with us now in third place for golds received behind the Russian Federation and Germany. The overall medal count has us in fourth with Russian Federation, then Ukraine followed by the United States and then Canada. Whatever way you look at it, we have done very well.

I have accomplished some will transcription and will post one tomorrow. I also decided, since it was handy, to work on my marriages to submit them to the World Marriage Index for the Guild of One Name Studies - one of the perks of membership in the Society. I have about 2500 to 3000 marriages in my family tree and will extract the marriages from all of my trees eventually to submit. If all of us do that there will be an amazing resource to look at eventually.

I also want to get my submissions for the probate index also at the Guild up to date. I have done about another four months of wills since I last submitted.

These two items I can do for the Guild since I can not readily do Marriage Challenges although I am contemplating buying the remainder of the parish registers for Andover Registration District in which case I would be able to work away at that District perhaps as the results do not include the Registry Office marriages anyway.

The snow keeps coming here and it is twenty degrees below zero celsius today although the sun is shining and it looks beautiful out there. Hopefully as March wanes the snow will as well and the temperature will climb above zeros celsius. This has been a long cold winter although I have a lot of wills transcribed I did not accomplish nearly as much as I would have liked. But that is perhaps always the case. I have more distractions these days than I had a couple of years ago.

Canada is a unique country with our trilingual heritage of First Nations, French and originally English but now a mixture of European/Asian/African ancestry although European/British Isles continues to dominate in total numbers. I am sad to see my English heritage slowly disappearing; I really have to concentrate now to remember the English ways of my father and grandparents. My mother in her own way was rather English having had an English mother (where English refers to the counties of the British Isles known as England). The idea of referring to Canada as French-Canada and English-Canada I have always found rather strange as there isn't an English-Canada except people speak English as a language but in general they are not English but rather have a very mixed ethnic background. There are not so many now with only English (meaning the country not the language) background like myself.

Soon time to view the closing ceremonies for the 2014 Paralympics. It has been a fascinating set of World athletics and wonderful to see so many countries taking part in both the Olympics and the Paralympics.