Saturday, April 11, 2020

What a beautiful day

The sun is shining, the temperature is 1 degree celsius with a high projected at 6 degrees celsius. A lovely spring day here with the temperature about normal for the season. This should help to dry up the back yard so that I can start walking and running around the yard. It will be like a track except I am sure my husband is hoping that I do not wear a track in the grass!

Yesterday I managed to complete the Blake Newsletter, 9th volume, 2nd issue for 2020. When I started the Blake Newsletter it was strictly two pages. It was just to keep the members of the Blake Study at FT DNA up to date. However as time passed I decided I would publish some of my transcriptions of parish registers and so it grew. Then I added in new information that I found at the Blake Museum in Bridgwater (namely the Blake Pedigree Chart that they had put on line) with the new information referring to what I had found regarding entries in the chart in the parish records. Then I also added in the information that I had acquired from wills and other documents. The Pedigree Chart itself is impressive in its detail. The few spots where I have added in corrections do not affect the Chart very much but hopefully add to it. So I did expand the Newsletter (this one is over 90 pages) because I wanted to summarize the work that I have done on the Blake one-name study over the past nine years and I will likely continue with these newsletters for quite a while. Although I mention them in my profile of the one-name study at the Guild of one-name studies they are not necessarily part of that project but rather are meant to be a stand alone for the day when I may step down as the researcher for the Blake study at some future date.

I also thought a lot about COVID-19 and the DNA work that has been done on it. With more and more people recovering, the presence of antibodies in their blood will help to determine how soon our countries can return to work. That along with contact tracing of infected people will, hopefully, reduce any recurrence after this flare-up of COVID-19 except in areas where it can be controlled. Looking at the images of the earth minus the pollution has been an inviting picture. Perhaps we can find a way to keep it that way; one can only hope for such an outcome from so much death, 100,000 people have died from this virus. We really need a fitting memorial to them.

Here in Ottawa, we could consider restricting traffic in our downtown area so that the new train would be the only means of passing through the downtown. I assume that the back to work will be a gradual process making it much easier to adapt to more and more people using the train. Then our air would be much fresher without all the cars in the small downtown area here. It would be a wonderful start. Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver all have subways or other public means of transportation so that they too could do the same. It would also make it easier to put people through a checkpoint before entering the downtown area giving us a COVID-19 free zone.

Today I return to phasing. I am now satisfied with Chromosome 1 and have done a little tweaking of Chromosome 2 and will work away at that today. A couple of new matches opened up a little more of the information on Chromosome 2 because they match known people and were slightly larger matches. Perhaps I will even try to get back to my wills transcription project.

So Isolation Day 7, phase 2 since we did have a shopping day, and I suspect this phase will be short lived as my husband has a medical appointment which has not been cancelled.

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