Another cold crisp morning at minus 10 degrees celsius but feels like minus 20 degrees apparently. The skies are clear; great telescope weather if you do not mind the cold! Dawn is breaking now though.
Yesterday I actually managed to get in a couple of hours of work. I continued with my Ancestry DNA matches getting them ordered and into my database for them. I use these matches differently from the other testing companies since I do not have any data other than the number of lengths and the total knowing that TIMBER has been used on the results to remove any parts of the length that are purely because of ethnicity in a particular group (in my case British Isles). It can have a huge impact for some - one of my known to me fourth cousins is reduced by 50% in total actual match and I have a number of other matches that show that to me as well. But the time tested trees in ancestry are so very handy to have along with the matching data that I am able to easily group many of these matches into specific grandparent/great-grandparent lines and even further back as I have a good sized Siderfin group and that was my 3x great grandmother Elizabeth Siderfin marrying John Rew and their daughter Elizabeth marrying John Pincombe, then their son William Robert Pincombe marrying Grace Gray and their son John Routledge Pincombe marrying Ellen Rosina Buller and the parents of my mother Helen Louise Pincombe. For all of these lines I do have a distinct matching group within Ancestry and they do make this easier with the Thru Lines now although I still maintain my own database because I have four siblings tested at Ancestry.
No work on the books but I am thinking about them once again as the dogs fit into my schedule rather than my fitting into their schedule. They are content though but still look at the front door wondering when their family will come through it. Soon enough for sure. But it is a long time for the baby; she is starting to transfer to me just a little. Her thick curly hair means that I have to spend a lot of extra time drying her so that I do not have water all over my house. The closeness is bringing her closer to me than the older dog which doesn't get as wet with her straight coat and long legs keeping her up out of the snow more. But she is also a very loving dog and misses her family. They are very compliant now and bedtime is really easy and I only heard from the little one once at 4:00 a.m.
So today a few chores, it is collection day and it is paper this week so must get that out to the street. I only have two packages of recycled material from the food preparation so will wait until next week to put that out. I freeze it to make that easy to handle.
Settled back into this routine of tariff. It is fraying tempers just a little but we will always be friends with the United States. You cannot have such a huge border and not be friends. Plus we are the same kind of people both the First Peoples who live on both sides of the border and the colonials. Although a lot of people other than Northern European/British Isles have come to this continent over the last four centuries the grouping of Northern European/British Isles continues to dominate that portion. In Canada the descendants of the early French Canadians continue to be the largest ethnic group (I think) mostly because they have moved west and east in Canada where some no longer speak French but I would still call them French Canadians and many of them have refound their French heritage because of bilingualism here. Although not official in other than a few provinces, there are French Canadian areas in many many of the provinces. For me with my English heritage we have very much disappeared into the Caucasian group where few know which aspects of life in Canada are actually British Isles English hence when BIFHSGO (British Isles Family History Society of Greater Ottawa) was established as a genealogy/friendship group back in the mid 1990s I became a member (as did Edward but it was my initiative although at that time the idea that I would spend eight hours a day on genealogical endeavours was certainly not in my wavelength and I definitely continued to avoid it as much as possible until I didn't in 2003 when my cousin George DeKay dragged me into the business of all of that with his request for a Profile for my Pincombe family). I joined because it contained that element of England that I still clung to with memories of particularly my Grandfather who loved his home country but was also a proud Canadian (my grandmother also a proud Canadian had a different perspective look at her home country (probably because her parents died when she was young)).
I feel privileged to live in Canada at this time as the First Peoples continue to be more a part of the governance of this great land that they have roamed for many thousands of years (13,000 at the latest sort of discussion in this area) but any earlier signs of their presence were obliterated by the Ice Age and the Younger Dryas periods of history on this part of the continent with the ice sheets extending down into the United States. Our Governor General belongs to the Inuit Peoples - I am really happy that she was willing to take that position in our governance and she has done an excellent job. That a group of First Nations ancestors crossed the Bering Strait 13,000+ years ago though seems to be a solid historical item. But the latest discoveries in South America show the presence of First Nations ancestors likely over 100,000 years ago from the South Pacific making that long journey across the Pacific which is amazing and it is their descendants who moved north into Central America and Mexico and the Southern United States but it is only limited by the inability to find information prior to the Ice Age and the Younger Dryas periods which obliterated anything that might have told us differently. Definitely the peoples of the First Nations have the knowledge of the past that we do not. Living with my grandfather certainly told me that as he talked about the various structures from his childhood living in Upper Clatford just across the London Road from Andover the much larger city near him. Stonehenge was known to him as a child and also he spent time in the New Forest area where his older sister lived with his Knight grandparents first at Turnworth (near Blandford Forum) Dorset and later in the New Forest Area. He loved the smell of the Sea he used to say as he spent some time near the English Channel (interestingly it is called the English Channel in England but in France it is called The Channel). Bodies of water can have different names for different peoples. Although, for sure, it is easier on the maps to have a standard naming perhaps but this is the modern age and as everything becomes more and more electronic we can just tap the name and see what other names have belonged to that spot in time. Turtle Island for one - the great continent on which we all live here in North America.
So today I will complete my task on the Ancestry matches into my database. I hope to look at all the new matches and get them ordered into their database and then I can spend some time on the task of Phasing my grandparents and great-grandparents. The full task was last completed in 2019 for my grandparents as I never finished my project started in 2022 - life just became too busy with the Siderfin Books. I was doing it every year until then having first started that in 2014.
I may take a peak at the Blake book and the work on the le Blak family of Rouen Normandy and the documents which I have now read but need to actually finish their transcription. We will see how the day goes.
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