Cross over points

Yesterday was a good working day once again and the cleaning of the main floor all accomplished. It rained, a lovely heavy rain and before it started I brushed the leaves off the car and away from the front of the house. I will likely rake them up one of these days and bag them to the curb. The tree out front is nearly empty of leaves and stems both of which come down in abundance. The gardens out front are getting a little overgrown so must do something about that but not really a specialty of mine to be honest. Gardening and I are not really good companions unless there is an intermediary which was of course Edward. He knew how he wanted it to look and I would say it was quite lovely. He enjoyed gardening (that was the farmer in him I guess; part of his father that he expressed in that way). 

I worked on the cross over points and there were a few subtle differences (shared cross-over points rather than close together which does streamline a chart for sure). I was more of a novice when I created the original chart and having these crossover points from Living DNA to combine with the crossover points from 23 and Me (just four siblings) and GedMatch does give a really good overall picture. No new work on the matches in Ancestry but will complete that this week likely. I am working on the last sibling and actually, surprisingly, the last sibling has some of the largest Blake matches which I had noticed but didn't really concentrate on it before. I have worked on Chromosome 22, 21, 20, 19 and 18 now in the cross over points chart with some work on 9, 7 and 1 earlier. I am also cleaning up the matches by chromosome putting items that are too small into a subfile in the main file. My known database is large now and covers very large amounts of each chromosome. I do not have any areas that do lack known chromosomal information surprisingly. I think one needs to be in that state in order to contemplate phasing great grandparents. I will do that as two sets of charts - separating out paternal and maternal so in essence creating my parent's grandparents and they are  for  my father - Edward Blake, Maria Jane (Knight) Blake, likely Cotterill but not committing to the actual individual, Elizabeth (Rawlings) Taylor - and my mother - William Robert Pincombe, Grace (Gray) Pincombe, Edwin Denner Buller and Ellen (Taylor) Buller. I rather think these charts will be quite interesting and they are the only ones that have cousins descending from them as we do not have any first cousins. 

Basement cleaning today and the cleaning week will be complete. It looks like a lovely day and it is 8 degrees celsius - perhaps we are finally into deep fall now and heading into winter. I do so love the winter that is for sure. It is going to be sunny and one could see the stars early this morning. 

Isolated as we are in North America and snow bound in the winter generally, Canada is an interesting country to live in. Extremely rich in natural resources and for the most part still quite pristine north of the large cities most of which are within 100 kilometres of the border we share with our neighbour the United States. The United States is about eight times larger than us in population and their population tends to be very large around their coasts with New York State being the largest State bordering on Canada. I have many second cousins in the United States and even more third and fourth cousins who are actually known to me. I have only met one of my American second cousins and he is deceased - son of my Great Aunt Sarah (Buller) Winters. He was visiting his grandmother when we went down to see her one year. But definitely like most polar countries you have to like winter otherwise you would be frustrated. Even with global warming it can get really cold here for days and weeks on end. 

An interesting thought emerged from yesterday's meeting with our Prime Minister and the President of the United States. The President sees us as competition with the United States rather than just the good friends and neighbours that we are. Perhaps that accounts for the huge tariffs laid on Canada although as our Prime Minister has mentioned that the overall tariff rate is lower than the 50% on steel and aluminium. Although I can be a mercantile type of person putting tariffs on my best friend and neighbour would not be my first thought especially if I was the much larger nation. I think my first thought would be how can we work together so that we both benefit from the ideal relationship with many many land crossings for shipping goods back and forth. I think I would not interfere with non government business deals between the countries unless they were going to deplete natural resources too quickly - one must preserve the goodness of the land and be cognizant of the business ability of companies that work back and forth across the border. But that is me and I probably, although conservative in my outlook and voting for the most part, tend to think of the greater good rather than my own purse. I think perhaps Canadians for the most part are more like that. We tend to think (and I thank our First Nations here for exposing us to the idea that life is continuous for the country with one generation of homo sapiens following another and we must protect the land because it is our lifeblood) in terms of long periods rather than short term gain. It showed up quite strongly actually watching the discussion between the President and our Prime Minister. The Prime Minister grew up in the north (Yukon) before moving to Alberta and he has a wide vision of Canada our Prime Minister. I may not always agree with him and actually did not vote for him I voted for youth because it is the youth of our country that will bring us back our industries lost to free trade over the generation of Free Trade in North America (I really did not find the trade between us to be unfair personally after all except for the oil that we sent south what came north was vastly  more than we sent south as trade (and then the millions of Canadians who went south and spent billions which we certainly contributed to in the past, interesting really).  When the colonials arrived in North America many of them (Edward's ancestors fitted into that description for sure) were highly educated wealthy people (but definitely Dissenters) but they had to put all of that asset behind them in order to create a life for their families in this new world and I was amazed at how much knowledge was lost in those early years as working the fields took away from time to educate their children as they had been. Looking for Edward's ancestors way back in the 1600s did reveal that to me (Edward was actually related to more than a dozen of the United States Presidents through time (distant cousinship uncovered by Gary Boyd Roberts and Edward over several working sessions) and his American relatives are an interesting group for sure most of whom are still in the United States although a number came to southwestern Ontario from the early 1800s on when land was free and the choices were west or northwest and his people chose northwest into Canada). The memory of one of the Rathbun family at a Family Reunion in the United States brought back one interesting piece of information about William Rathbun (Edward's ancestor) who came to Canada in the early 1830s because he had an itchy foot. What a marvelous piece to hand down through a family.  Interesting really as Edward's colonial roots were deep in New England/New York/New Jersey and Pennsylvania and it got so I recognized some of the places when we were there so very often.

It is a quirk of fate that Edward did not take the job at the Library of Congress in the United States all those years ago as I would now be there instead of here. Interesting really; at that time I was more than willing to move to Washington but now over 80 I am here and here I will remain. This is my home and I would be totally displaced anywhere else including southwestern Ontario where I grew up I must admit although as I told my daughter when she retires and comes home I am willing to move to where-ever she finds a job that interests her. Because as one ages the orbit around you shrinks slowly but surely and it really doesn't matter where you are and in my case so long as you have your trusty computer (and this one is new so good for maybe three years), your access to records and your desire to spend time writing the books in the minds of your grandfather and mother and it will go on as I work my way through all those family lines most of whom, as descendants, still live in the British Isles. Edward did write a book on his Kipp family and later updated it to include new information which is on his website. He was thinking of writing books about his other families but I would say his interest did concentrate on this line of his father. His father died when  he was just two years of age and there was no memory of him in his mind and so along with doing his work through life (he was a PhD Chemist and had his Masters in Library Science) he collected vast amounts of information on his Kipp family and when his mother asked him to collect information on her family he did do that but perhaps with not quite the enthusiasm that went into the Kipp family. Her family had come mostly out of New England and New York States in the mid to late 1700s heading to the Maritimes (some were definitely loyalists and others were planters who had come earlier before the Revolution). They gradually moved onwards into Northern Ontario initially and then down into the south where the marriage between a loyalist/planter descendant in the Link family and a patriot descendant in the Kipp family took place (Edward's parents) although the knowledge of the loyalists/planters was long gone but uncovered by Edward. I think the Patriot knowledge was certainly in the Kipp family, but then I do not know them really,  as it quickly emerged that Jonathan Mead was a Patriot (the father of the wife of Isaac Kipp (Hannah Mead) who came to Canada in October of 1800 and Edward's two times great grandparents (huge generations in that family line as Isaac Kipp was born 1 Nov 1764)). There are many many American Patriot descendants in Ontario who are firmly Canadian and love it here in their now country. But it is cold here in the winter and many many of them went south for the summer heat in the winter these past centuries! 

Time to make tea and do solitaire puzzles.