As I completed my solitaire set of games for the day I opened the drapes and saw dawn in the east arising above the houses across from me. My mind actually strayed as I contemplated spring coming and the need to plan the garden. Hardly possible that I was in such a contemplation; gardening is never my thing for sure. But there is a necessity to start thinking about growing plants and buying earth and March does tend to bring that to mind. Lent without Borders today shared a question for reflection and I found my mind looking back over my marriage. Living with Edward for 54.5 years surely is part of my thinking about gardening plus my older daughter who spends summer gardening time with me as March would bring out the seed catalogues and the setting up of the growing lights through all of our marriage years. Mostly I watched; helping when asked but staying out of the way because that was really his thing; all of that gardening he did until he didn't and he asked for my help daily. Looking back on his retirement in 2004 and then by the time he persuaded me to retire in 2007 and I was recruited to help in the yard as he was finding it a lot of work and perhaps a bit lonely as our oldest daughter generally worked with him in the garden. They shared a love of astronomy, reading, computers and gardening from her earliest days. She was still a toddler when she started to help plant the seedlings that they had watched grow from late March until spring planting time. To look through the telescope Edward built a small stool for her to stand on in those early days. They spent hours looking at Observation Charts. But her work took her far from home after she completed her PhD but they still had their chatting time when she came home and we visited her regularly on all those genealogy trips to various repositories that were close to her. Necessity is often the mother of invention and some of Edward's greatest research came during those years and he did miss his eldest daughter for sure. They had an iron bond. That is also true of his youngest daughter; their strong interest was skiing, hiking, biking and running. He biked and she ran. They were all over Orleans running and biking. By the time I retired though her interests had taken her away as well and there was just me left. It was the first eight years of our marriage without children that came back to him then and we embarked on a traveling spree (much like those early years before children) that took us all over the north eastern United States where his ancestors had lived from the early days of the British Colonies and the Dutch Colonies. Most of his ancestors coming to Canada came for the land after 1800 but there were a few loyalists on his mother's side (Palatine who had gone to England from the Palatinate and Queen Anne sent them to America; they felt safe in the British fold I suspect). He discovered all of that in those years and so much more as we traveled to Europe most years or every other year. He called me his encyclopaedia because I was a history buff as a sideline through my years and have a memory that forgets little in terms of things worth remembering (my mind is like that). I loved reading factual history books - huge tomes that took hours but that was my hobby I suppose if I ever had one but mostly I just liked to know the history of the world. It is intriguing how our ancestors survived one catastrophe after another; one war after another; one invasion after another. Homo sapiens has been a winner for sure but I personally believe that in those early years of mankind when God walked with man we learned from Him how to survive but now He watches and waits to see if we have learned enough about living and loving our fellow man from Jesus. Time will tell for sure; it is now two thousand years since Jesus walked with man and shared the Two New Commandments - Matthew 22:37-40: [37] ....Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind and with all they strength. [38] This is the first and great commandment. [39] And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. [40] On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. And I personally believe, our very survival as a species.
Yesterday was another day of great accomplishment. I continued to search out the missing BMBs for the Siderfin family. It is a slow process to go through all the work that has been done by other researchers and eventually I will go into my own fiche but I will look at what has been produced online first because that is logical. Reading fiche is not as easy as reading type! I have expanded the baptisms by about 75%, the marriages by perhaps 50% and the burials by about 80%. Today I will return to working on the 1939 Register out of curiosity mostly but the Siderfin family was close and one tends to find families with visitors quite a bit which is helpful for that missing female Siderfin in particular. One would describe Siderfin as a small study I would think but they have managed to spread around the world and still there are Siderfin members in England (my cousin to whom I gave the one-name study at the Guild is one of those descendants).
We are promised a slightly warmer day today and partly sunny. It is minus 5 degrees celsius at 7:00 a.m.. It is cloudy still this morning. A little longer on housekeeping on the computer and then off to Breakfast - my favourite meal of the day.
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