Praise be to God and thank you to President Trump for his tireless work on helping to free the last living hostages held in Gaza and now the next step of bringing peace to the Middle East. Prime Minister Carney has flown to Egypt to be part of the discussion and thank you to him for that. It is important that so many world leaders are involved in this pathway to peace in the Middle East.
A wonderful Thanksgiving Service at Church, a beautiful sermon and today is official secular Thanksgiving. When I was a child this was one of the big festivals in my childhood both at Church on Sunday and at home and because my father owned his own business and the odds were he would be working Monday we celebrated on Sunday as well. When I was very young and my great aunts and uncles were still alive along with my grandparents we would be so many people in my house celebrating Thanksgiving. My favourite part was always the sausage that stuffed the small cavity in the turkey. I loved sausage, cranberry sauce, baked potatoes, cabbage salad, squash and peas (I think there may have been corn as well but I am not fond of corn). I loved having all the people around me that I knew; it was very special but that is part of a big family for sure. Life moves on though and styles change and people are busy and families shrink. I made my perfect Chicken Stew yesterday and it was lovely and I enjoyed it very much. I was chatting with my daughter whilst I was preparing it as we do Yoga together using The Fitness Coach of the WII Sunday afternoons and it is all online. I do love online and one feels close to one's kin. My other daughter was working in the ER and that was maybe busy; I do not know. I admire her very much for the work she does especially the ER - it is hard work and very fast moving probably on occasion I am not there but generally it is very busy. People do not have family doctors like they used to and they end up in the ERs needing emergency medical care.
Continued working on Chromosome 15 and decided to label the lengths of chromosome that were known to me as this is one chromosome that lacks two of the grandparents - Pincombe and Rawlings. I wrote an email to someone I wrote to about ten years ago now on Ancestry when our match first appeared (actually he wrote to me first). I think he matches on the Rew-Siderfin line and he thought perhaps it was that the Rew family were actually Rowe or vice versa but I have traced Rew back several generations and that was not the case but my 2x great grandmother was a twin and her sister had married John Griffith and I noticed the name Thomas Griffith in this person's table (one of their sons was Thomas Griffith). The match taken into Gedmatch was visible but matches with this level tended to be larger perhaps twice the size and he was sure of his Griffith line but I thought I would try one more time to see if he had resolved it as a Rew-Siderfin line would satisfy the Pincombe grandparent and it was not a bad size plus everyone but me matched it (at the moment that is the only match in that particular length - unusual for the thousands of matches that I have). We will see. This is a chromosome where I have at least 50 matches in the Buller line where I am pretty much the only one and they are very large (40 cM or more) - no idea who they are. There are just a few Rawlings matches but Living DNA has given me more and so I will be looking at them when I return to working on Chromosome 15. I suspect the layout is just fine but I want to verify it. Now that I am into the bigger chromosomes this idea of labeling the lengths will be helpful I rather think as I verify new matches.
Today is basement cleaning day and I will soon start the robot vacuuming the rugs. I also want to do one hour in the garden as I did not do that yesterday. No work on the photo albums and I do plan on doing some of that this afternoon just to get myself back into that routine as well. The day will fly by unfortunately but this downsizing has to occur and needs to occur without a rushed timeline so as to preserve items that meant a great deal to Edward in terms of his children and grandchildren. I remember when our second daughter was a newborn and I looked at her face and thought how much like her Dad's pictures she looked from her very first days. As I look at both of my children they resemble their father's side far more than me; where was I but I was there carrying them within me and at their birth and sometimes I see little things that remind me of my family.
Funny that I had no actual interest in genealogy up to 2003 - I loved to hear my grandparents and parents talk about their ancestors but in terms of putting on paper I had no interest and now my days are full of that and nothing else really. Mind you my days were pretty full of such ancestral endeavours from the early days of knowing Edward as he wondered so much about his Kipp family a lot of the time actually when he was not busy studying or working. It consumed him; he was so interested. The next Newsletter is H11 and I will begin to think about the yearly Kipp Newsletter as I just didn't have enough to put into one every quarter. I could have repeated all of his comments but they are in his blog which is on the website that he created. There they are in his own words and I know very little about the Kipp families in the present and even near past. More information further back as I looked up many items for him as we went to the repositories. He loved learning all of that but for him finding his yDNA led him back to Hendrick Hendricksen Kip of New Amsterdam/New York and then back to Amsterdam, The Netherlands was a high point in all of that for sure - it was fitting as a Scientist (PhD Chemistry) that he would be using the knowledge of science to pursue his family! When he decided to give a talk on DNA to the OGS group and he persuaded me to be part of that; I loved the way that he so enjoyed sharing his great find. Edward discovered a renewed great love for teaching with the Ottawa Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society (now Ontario Ancestors) and the United Empire Loyalist Association of Canada (Ottawa Branch and St Lawrence Branch) although his Loyalist ancestors ended up being few and his Patriot many along with Planters in what is now Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in the 1750s I believe would need to look that up.
Edward (along with others) kept trying to get me to speak and I did sometimes but I really prefer my very quiet life and always have. I did do some volunteer (sometimes volunteered!) work but mostly for my children's groups or I helped at school one day a week for many years while my children were there or just something Edward really wanted me to do like volunteer Secretary for his United Church and volunteer Treasurer for Camp Bitobi for a few years and such. I was also part of the area World Day of Prayer services which I very much enjoyed - in general the services were somewhere else but you only really hold so many World Day of Prayer services in a big city area. So a quiet life and once my health was sufficiently recovered and it takes a long time to recover from a breakdown (referred to as a Mental Illness by some amazingly who seemed to know more about my health than I did! but I look at it and I never actually thought that until I took the course on setting up Encounter Groups at St Paul University and understood better where I had been, what I had been through and how I recovered). I would say that I did not know very much about Mental Health issues and just didn't think I was that severely ill but it is surprising actually what constitutes a mental health issue.
I was working at home for about a dozen plus years from the time we moved here starting a couple of years after our arrival (I had asked not long after we first arrived as it was recommended to me by the person who interviewed Edward for the job at NRC; they employed proofreaders who worked at home) whilst looking after our little one as a proofreader and copyeditor for local printers principally. Although I did not start out with working for private printers, I was working for the Scientific Journals published/managed by the National Research Council but my job was cut by then Prime Minister Mulroney but I quickly found the job with the printers.
Then I returned to work outside the home first at the Medical School in 1994 where I once again toyed with the idea of doing my Masters for my boss at the time (I had started to proceed with doing my masters when I was proofreading at NRC actually but I became pregnant with our second child (a wonderful surprise but at 36 (I was 28 when my first child was born) it was a challenge and I did not move ahead with doing my Masters as I felt she needed me)).
I moved then from the Medical School to working at the General Hospital in 1996 which merged with all the hospitals in Ottawa except Montfort as The Ottawa Hospital with several campuses and over time I worked at all of the main campuses (Civic, General and Riverside), then a year plus at Health Canada. Once I left the area in terms of working at home I really disappeared in 1994; I just lived here and kept to myself and helped my children whenever they asked (I actually kept the score for my youngest daughter's baseball team, I never missed a game rushing home in time for a quick supper) and helped or went with Edward whenever where ever he asked - that was my life and I much preferred it. We lived a very quiet family life in a house that I am still in 47 years later although Edward did think about moving and he and the girls went looking at singles but the lots were too small for his garden and the bedrooms were so tiny for the girls. Here we remained for most of our life in Ottawa (just a couple of years in the south end before moving here much closer to NRC where Edward worked and the French Immersion schools were much closer to our house eliminating a long bus ride for a five year old with a chronic condition (asthma)).
Tea is cooling, must drink it and do my solitaire puzzles. I certainly am verbose today; I guess it is the holiday mood as one remembers past Thanksgivings and past times together as a family.
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