They have come home once again

 Yesterday whilst I was working away on my Ancestry matches I could hear a sudden whoosh outside of my window and looked up to see a large flock of birds swooping down towards the bird feeders. They were red winged blackbirds and they have come home for the summer. It is a wondrous sight to see these migrations coming back. The day was full of such large groups of birds taking a break during the winter snow storm to come down to shelter and food before heading further north although some will stay here. What a wonder nature really is and preserving it should be ever upper most in our minds. For if the birds can not live in our world then how can we? It really is just a simple fact of life. They tell us that the air is good, the land is good and the water is good else they would not survive. They deserve our respect and care. 

Prayers for Ukraine as always. Proliferation of nuclear weapons does not bode well for the future of the world given the aggressive militaristic attitude of Russia (likely Russia would blame Belarus for an "accidental" nuclear attack) and North Korea (and perhaps China that remains to be seen though as they too do not like nuclear weapon saber rattling). There can be great goodness in nuclear power but there is an evil side to it as well as it would destroy God's earth - His creation. Watching The 100 a Netflix production and it is fascinating. A world after Nuclear War has destroyed the earth (I believe it would actually break up into asteroids and be flung around the universe). But it is 100 years later and 100 young people have been sent to earth to see if everyone could return because the space stations which had maintained a semblance of the life on earth were running out of survival ability - their date stamp had been reached.

My favourite prayer:

Dear Father hear and bless thy beasts and singing birds 

And guard with tenderness small things that have no words

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

There are other lines I put in to remember my grandparents, parents, siblings and husband who have passed on in this life but the basic prayer has been the same from childhood when I learned it from my grandfather. There is a beauty in those few lines that really tell the story of mankind - dominion over the earth but with control comes responsibility and that responsibility is vast.

Yesterday was a great day for research although  not on Siderfin or the one-name studies. I decided to work on the 37 matches that my three siblings and myself have collected up over the past couple of months on Ancestry. I keep them all in an excel file where the four siblings are all recorded beside each other letting me see the matches readily. Ancestry has a new addition - matching the Paternal, Maternal or Unassigned sides of one's family. Actually it is quite good and on occasion has provided rather new and interesting ground. Not having the actual values of the matches has not proven to be a hindrance in looking at them in some ways - all of us have tested at other companies so have those results and it is possible to look at the Ancestry matches knowing the number of chromosome matches involved and actually apply that in a logical way and realize that these individuals are also matching us in the same area since often enough one of us is a smaller match and hence the match must be in a particular chromosome.  

Another Sunday and Church on You-Tube. We are into Lent 5 now and I have missed having a Bible Study for Lent. Next year I must select a book and do one totally on my own unless I find one on the Internet. Perhaps I did not look hard enough. I did read the one book which was interesting and I did follow through with all of the suggestions on "Mapping the Journey" which I found to be a thought provoking time. 

Chapter two - The Path of the Holy Fool

Day 2 - Chapter 2 (23 pages)

Living the brave truth is the body of this chapter named The Journey to Consciousness. I am humbled by the ability of people to overcome prejudice because I know that as a person who is white I do not suffer from the sorts of prejudice that many of the peoples of the world experience. But my own path of understanding has led me to believe that the real truth is that we must walk together.

Suggested advice was bad advice for me as it turned out  – become more active in the life around you. That did not awaken in me any sense of belonging but rather a feeling that I was rejected when the suggestion was proposed to me. I did not fit in (partly me probably). My own sense of what I was on earth to do came to the rescue and I found again my driving force as I retreated from that life.

Reflection Exercise

Appointed to a volunteer role which I could do and did for a number of years but again it was not something that was actually good for my mental health. Since then I have found my place in the volunteer world in my retirement which is home working on my transcription documents – old parish church records from the 16^th and 17^th centuries (England).

I do wonder what my life would have been had I married at 16 years of age and gone to Africa. I was going to go into medicine there. Instead I spent an entire lifetime here in Canada married at 20 to another. I am now widowed but in widowhood I have definitely developed even further my interest in my parent’s surnames as one-name studies with the Guild of one-name studies. It would not have happened likely had I gone to Africa and this intense interest although developing when my husband was still alive (he was an avid genealogist) has totally enveloped me now in a way I would not have thought possible (but it was my cousin George DeKay who sent me down that path when he was editor of the Westminster-Delaware History Books in 2003-5 and needed a Profile for my Pincombe family line in that area!).

I was cared for by a psychiatrist after a physical/nervous/mental breakdown in my early 30s. I appreciated all of his insights and have lived the life he suggested when I have been able. I like to be on the periphery of life doing my bit but preserving my quietness.