The days go by in a normalized fashion which suits my life style. At 80 I have just so many items that I want to do there isn't room for anything else. I am comfortable although the house is too big but that will be resolved in its own time. At the moment I just clean it.
Not much work done yesterday; generally I just clean and do my solitaire weekly challenge which is playing 16 Spider Solitaire puzzles which gives me double bonus points or something. I am not that interested in the bonus points but do enjoy playing the extra 16 Spider Solitaire games along with the five daily Solitaire games. I usually do that on Mondays and Tuesdays every week. You can just pick it up at any time which is a little more difficult with my work as it does require a longer concentrated effort.
Although as luck with have it by the end of the day I did have two hours of work on Chromosome 15 matches and moved ahead there. Unusually I have not moved any of these matches to the "too small" folder simply because they are not. They are large matches and I am now thinking they may be from the Taylor family in Birmingham. Edwin Denner Buller married Ellen Taylor although I have not yet found the marriage but a lot of strange family stories goes along with that none of which can be collaborated so I generally do not consider them. I am suspicious though that her illegitimate child may be more than a half sibling to my grandmother. When the twins were born (my grandmother's younger siblings) Ellen was able to keep them alive very skillfully and instructed my grandmother on how to care for them so that she would have rest periods. My grandmother was ten years of age then and having had a sibling ten years younger than myself - yes a child that young can look after even a newborn. Not for long periods but for care that is simple absolutely a ten year old can do it. But I began to wonder if my grandmother's mother had been a military nurse. It would account for her skill. Edwin was in South Africa working for his uncle Edwin Withers who was a jeweller in Birmingham, England. My great grandmother's first child was born 24 Dec 1879 in Erdington (part of Birmingham, Warwickshire) at the Workhouse. She does list herself as a domestic servant on the registration though but I am wondering. She would have been returned to Birmingham (her home) after her pregnancy was discovered for sure I am thinking. She grew up just a few blocks away from Edwin and her father was a boot/shoe manufacturer. Edwin's father was a Pork Butcher/Restauranteur. A year after the birth the First Boer War began (16 Dec 1880) and Edwin was a medic in the army (not sure if he volunteered or if he was there and conscripted (no ideas on that)). But definitely his records exist but he was injured in 1882 and sent home to recover which was Birmingham and the hospital chosen was the same workhouse where Ellen was then living with her small daughter (on the census of 1881). Edwin arrived after the census as he does not appear on any census known to me in 1881 but I have him in all the rest. It sounds far fetched but who knows. The circumstance of them growing up in the same area with fathers owing businesses that could conceivably bring them together is interesting. Even more interesting a descendant of that family sent me a note on Ancestry talking about Ellen so I wondered. But I still do not have a marriage registration although both Ellen and Edwin registered their children at birth with the mother's name as Ellen Buller. It is an intriguing story for sure.
The Chelsea Pension Records show him in active service by November 1879 but I would imagine that the English sphere in South Africa was rather contained so to speak so he would likely know in particular the military that was there at that time. So an interesting conundrum. Certainly my grandmother did not have a lot of knowledge on her parents although one of the many stories was that Edwin and Ellen married in Paris, France. So there you go; an intriguing mystery that is now 145 years old!
I assume he had some training prior to active service but again my knowledge on that is limited as I can not find very much on him other than what I found already. He was injured and walked with a limp the rest of his life. As far as I can tell their life was fairly good for them as Edwin always worked two jobs (he drove a vehicle for one and for the other I would have to look that up again). But he was disinherited by his family for marrying a woman with an illegitimate child apparently. So always interesting this family but actual details very difficult to find. But I have traced the Taylor family back and they appear to be in the Warwickshire/Shropshire area back into the mid 1700s and earlier so the idea that she was some sort of an Irish orphan is a bit vague - another one of those stories (one of 16 children she did have siblings but only six). The mtDNA tells me that she descends from an ancient British line in the "Blood of Isles Database" surprisingly matching extremely well) and located in Ayrshire/Argyllshire, Scotland. This mtDNA line made its way to the Carolinas with the Reverend William Martin in 1772 and the carriers were descendants of Scot planters sent by Cromwell in the 1640s to Ireland. But I have also found matches with people who have traced back to ancestors who came to Cumberland and Warwickshire by the mid 1700s.
I have noticed now that many of the Buller matches are American (where Buller includes Taylor) and actually quite early Colonial and certainly I do find this Taylor family to be in that area - Warwickshire/Shropshire in the mid 1700s on and possibly earlier it is not an easy name to research. The length on Chromosome 15 right at the beginning captures several common pile-up areas predominantly Anglo-Saxon it would appear. Matches at 40+ cM are generally very interesting but definitely these are very old for a common connection likely with cousins in the United States having a very deep ancestral colonial ancestry.
I am only half way through these matches in Chromosome 15 as there are so many that belong to this group (and I didn't collect them all surprisingly). Some of them though are Rawlings and I slipped up on a few calling them Buller but correcting that now. I also do not know who the Rawlings are (likely they include both Rawlings and Cotterill and again these names are found in early colonial American records). It may well be forever a mystery with no one particularly knowing the answer as my grandmother was just eleven when her mother died and fourteen when her father died. Had my mother chosen to live with her aunts (Buller I think although Grandma lived with her aunt Kate Taylor when she left the Cottage Homes and went to work)) then more knowledge likely but she chose her younger siblings and went off to the Marston Green Cottage Homes where she was Head Girl and two of her sisters were with her (Ada and Sarah, with May and of course Edwin being in a different Cottage I understood from Grandma).
Hamas is executing the Palestinians and calling them traitors and I would suspect that the Palestinians who came over the withdrawal line and were shot were forced to do that by Hamas or they would have killed their Palestinian families (the problem would be not knowing as they could be suicide bombers willingly killing themselves which is against God's laws; suicide is wrong). Really Hamas are terrible satanists but President Trump has said that he will disarm them if they do not disarm themselves. Surely these wicked satanists could let the Palestinians have their peace. They are so evil. Plus they are not providing the bodies of the dead hostages in a timely fashion (and the Geneva Convention says that hostages must be protected if they are taken so they should really be still alive). They have had plenty of time to find them and have them ready for transport.
So today I must get some cleaning done. Breakfast first, my tea was lovely.
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