Skiing and it was a challenge

 Back on skis but just in the back yard thus far. I did stay on my feet first of all but the going was slow although towards the end I was speeding up somewhat. Today I will go again as it may be a little warmer; time will tell. But it was nice to actually be out on my skis again. 

I worked on Chromosome 20 and it was very slow going actually. I do have good cousins matches which is very helpful but separating out a couple of the matches proved to be just a bit difficult and one not resolved. There should be two siblings matching this individual but only one does and that always makes me suspicious. It is not that important a match and I did move on and will continue with Chromosome 20 today but I think first I will complete the Pincombe Newsletter and get that off of my plate. I just have to enter in the transcriptions. Like all the newsletters for the next two years there will be a discussion on where I am going with the books since two of the Newsletters are directly related to two of the studies - namely Pincombe and Blake that have a Newsletter. The yearly Kipp Newsletter will only look at the yDNA study which I am really just maintaining at this time until I do find someone within the family who will take it on. But not a rush I want it to be a successful venture this study. 

We also went shopping and I found the perfect socks for regular wear and bought ten exactly the same (I like that as you never run out of a match that way!). Already washed up and ready to go and I have to decide what to do with the socks that have small holes in them. It does seem disgraceful to throw them out and I will use them as rags for a while as they are cotton primarily and good for scrubbing and things like that. But I have always loathed darned socks since the days that we no longer knit our own socks and can readily repair a hole when they are hand knitted. 

Still more shopping to do as I am out of laundry detergent (although do have a powder which I am considering switching to actually so as not to have that plastic container to throw out). I am out of my big container of liquid detergent for dish washing and cleaning and wish there was an alternative as that is another big plastic container. I also need a cleaner (I always used to use Mr Clean but will have a look around to see what I can find that isn't a big plastic container). I go through each of these perhaps 1.5 containers per year. Then a little more shopping on top of that of items that I always buy in bulk and they are running out. 

Getting ready for Christmas as well and my preferred way of shopping once the children were old enough was just to take them with me and buy what they wanted, wrap it up and then everybody is happy on Christmas Day because they got what they wanted. Surprises are nice but I really hate shopping so taking anything back is just something I avoid if that is at all possible. 

Nice to have all the snow and with it one must accept the cold and it is minus 12 degrees celsius and the snow is coming; as the snow increases the temperature is going to rise somewhat perhaps to minus 5 degrees celsius but it will be lovely skiing weather. Another lovely winter in Canada and it is my favourite season. 

The snow tires are doing their job and glad that I finally got them on (the two week delay was my flu bug that incapacitated me for a few days), It remains an interesting experience mostly because I did manage although someone bringing me food would have been nice I must admit but perhaps it is good to get up and get it yourself. The flu shot is such a wonderful gift and hopefully that was my first and last time with flu for a while since there are always different strains about and being protected from at least some of them is very helpful. The car is six years old now but looks fairly new except one knows it is older looking at it. It only has 32,210 kilometres on it and will be lucky to see 40,000 kilometres even in ten years if it remains with us for such a long time. That is dubious actually but one never knows. When it is really cold I always wonder if the engine will turn over when I start it but it is in the garage protected from the really cold winds but still the garage is unheated except for what leaks from the house into the garage and I can honestly say not too much as it is really cold in there. But turn over it does even after minus 20+ degrees this winter. Surprises actually and just a quick warmup for five minutes or less and the needle is moving up to show the engine warming up nicely. 

Tea drank and must do my solitaire puzzles. The world moves on around me and I am not watching the news very much these days although I do read articles online most days but in my little corner of the world I can only read and contemplate how much God's words ring true day after day. Love thy neighbour as thyself and then war will end all over the world. 

The way to the future

Perhaps it is a return to winter as we are used to with lots of snow about us these days but I feel as if the momentum has really started and Canada is finding its feet in the world. We always were in the world very much part of everything going on but we tended to not be the leader so much as a follower. But circumstances, particularly the need to be tariff proof, has lead us to a slightly different path. That path is being formed by our Prime Minister who has come out of his much quieter life to take on the leadership of Canada in a crisis moment (but he shares that moment with his cabinet supporting him all along the way and doesn't take personal credit for everything). One feels that there is a team at the top working hard on each of their projects bringing it all together and this Prime Minister is a great director. Thank you to him. Another Conservative has crossed the floor to give the Liberals a movement towards majority - just one seat short now. I think he has shown great commitment to the Conservative ideals that many of us have and our politics are such that he had to cross the floor in order to express those feelings. I do see that value in the American system where individual groups in either party will form with the other party a relationship which leads to change that is desired by the American people. Here they have to cross the floor and face that criticism but I feel he has done the right thing; we need to move forward and we can not move forward unless all parties accept that this is the best path to make us tariff proof. I do not see an alternative really that works for Canada. Go Canada Go and bring us to a position where we are able to manage and be tariff proof. That is the aim in all of this effort on our part to travel within Canada, to buy Canadian (and I paid several dollars more for items in the store yesterday so as to ensure that I was buying Canadian (canned salmon from British Columbia was one I particularly noticed)). We look at all the labels to make sure they are made in Canada. I am sad to give up my favourite cookies (American made) but must for the moment but I can think about how lovely it will be to buy a package of them once we are tariff proof. It has become a dream for all Canadians. 

I did manage to get to the Prayer meeting yesterday for Alongside Hope (was PWRDF) and it was to be special because of our reflector the Right Rev. Ann Martha Keenainak who was elected suffragan bishop of the South Baffin deanery of the Diocese of the Arctic and it was so exciting to learn so much about her Diocese. I get up and walk about during the meetings but I can hear all that is said very well; I am a restless person but that is a feature I have had all of my life! Activity and myself always have gone hand in hand. She painted a wonderful picture of life that I greatly appreciated. Another meeting following and I had to leave this one a little early just after the reflector completed her part of the prayer session. Thank you to her for sharing so much with us. Our First Nations brothers and sisters know so much about this great land called Turtle Island by them; it is an interesting name and the idea of the protective shell of the Turtle is very very interesting actually. That has only just occurred to me and we have so much to learn about this great land which stretches back way into the eons of time. 

I completed Chromosome 21 yesterday and was rewarded with good lengths of known Blake from 10 cM to 42 cM, Rawlings from 1 to 42 cM, Buller from 1 to 33 cM, I have four cousins known to me on that chromosome which is 48 cM long. There are another 8 matches that fit into various places yielding a fully known chromosome (and this is the case for all of them actually with the exception of one tiny length (2 cM) at the beginning of one chromosome for just one sibling. On this chromosome all of the sections can be identified to one of two great grandparents but I am only listing the ones in general that lead me back to a singleton great grandparent.  Chromosome 22 was not quite so obliging and I will have to review trees and matches in common to see if I can improve on that. Today I will do some work on Chromosome 20 with regard to phasing great grandparents (I have six known cousins on this chromosome). 

I did complete the H11 Newsletter and it is has been sent in for review. It is very short but that is normal for three of the four issues a year. When I do searches to see if anything new has arisen I tend to only find my newsletter but once again I did locate one interesting item which I passed along in the newsletter.

 I am working on the Pincombe Newsletter and just have to add in the transcriptions which I have done (most are available on Find My Past these days and I am considering halting that but I am also reaching the end of some of it as well). 

Groceries all bought and it was a catch up week with two of us now and my cupboards I tend to run down quite low as we do eat slightly differently and I just follow the lead and make whatever suits both of us. After a busy day we treated ourselves to a Canadian made pizza which was delicious and a lovely fresh lettuce salad (hydroponic lettuce from nearby). Life was much easier when you did not have to spend all that time checking to help make Canada tariff proof and perhaps those days will come to an end and we can go back somewhat to enjoying life as it was although the new foods that are coming in from around the world we do try because it does make us tariff proof. But we still buy a lot of American products simply because it is winter and the growing season is several months in the past now. 

Another busy day ahead but mostly research. I do enjoy the research days although the cleaning is also fine as I get lots of exercise. Cleared the snow yesterday off the porch, patio and the very top of the laneway. There was a huge pile at the end of the laneway after the municipal plow went through but the company quickly cleared that away; a well spent addition to my life for sure. 

Drinking my tea and on to solitaire puzzles.  

 

 

Snow Snow Snow and it is still falling

 Beautiful white snow all around us and still falling. The company has cleared the laneway so we are free to go where ever we want as clearing the end of the laneway is not the easiest job in the world. Canada gets a lot of snow - some years more than others but a lot of snow. I cleared the porch and patio and the top of the laneway later in the afternoon yesterday and will do that again today. But we are now officially covered with snow and hopefully it will stay now until spring. I do love the snow. It is so comforting watching it coming down snowflake by snowflake year after year. It tells the story of Canada; we are the land of ice and snow covered most times six months of the year. It shapes everything about us although we have come up with unique ways to get Mother Nature to work with us using greenhouses and growing summer vegetables in the winter. Often we get enough sun to really make that viable in some areas of the country. We do really enjoy all the fruits and vegetables that come north to us from our friend and neighbour the United States but necessity has determined that we need to be tariff proof and so we are on our trek about the world finding new customers for our goods and buying theirs and so the food on our shelves may just have a different look and it will help us to be tariff proof. 

Yesterday was a washing day and I spent a few hours at that as my washing machine is very efficient but has an extremely strong spin and I like to be on hand just in case it decides that the items within its drum are not arranged exactly to its liking. I can then halt it and re-arrange which I do. It is a very effective machine though I must admit. We bought the new washer and dryer just after the COVID shutdown and had to wait for delivery perhaps two months during which time we mimicked our ancestors and washed clothes by hand. It was a very interesting experience actually. 

I also worked on Chromosome 22 for the phasing of the great grandparents and completed that chromosome and again I was able to separate out quite a bit of the Knight family (Maria Jane (Knight) Blake was my great grandmother) and a length for Cotterell/Cotterill which was very interesting. A few of the others appear obvious but need to do a little more work on the trees to say one or the other. But I will move forward to Chromosome 21 as I want to complete this table quickly and then move to the more difficult work of separating the two lines at each grandparent level. Having the data in a neat display works very well for me. These are the short chromosomes that I am working with and perhaps one a day but I do need to think more about the Newsletters - H11 and Pincombe - that are past due and I am also getting back into the two books I am writing. Sometimes in variety I get more done as I do not get bogged down in one thought. 

A research day primarily but I have a meeting at 1:00 which I do want to attend (a prayer group) and groceries as it is that time of the week once again so must prepare my menu thoughts and my list. The skis are also ready to go and we may give that a try as well although it is meant to be a wind chill of -19 degrees celsius so perhaps a short run which might be good for this 80 year old. But I do love skiing. 

The bargaining chips begin to pile up as we head into discussion on USMCA/MUSCA and CUSMA this next year. One wonders where the United States will move to on this one although our main effort at this time continues to be making ourselves tariff proof and that has a tremendous effect on our old traveling/buying/spending habits as we move to increase our internal purchases between provinces to support everyone's production of goods and services. It is good for us actually but we were not unhappy with the system as it existed but times change and so must we. Some of us drag our feet but the forward momentum can be felt and we are seeing good results with the unemployment rate decreasing slowly and the GDP going up slowly. It will benefit Canada in the long run in a huge way as we diversify and start to incorporate some of the items that we have just not taken advantage of (minerals, oil, gas and others) and increase our GDP (which increases how much we can spend on the military). I had a thought on the F-35 and I do think we should continue with buying the 88 myself but we need planes in the Arctic specific for that area and why not the Swedish Griffin as it is a very effective plane especially in the Arctic and there is the bonus of increased production here in Canada if we buy their planes as well. Having two different kinds - I do not see it as a problem since we are a huge country and having two different sets of military planes happened often during World War II. It just makes our military ever more versatile and that is a good thing. Then there is the need to make ourselves tariff proof for sure. The Prime Minister is doing a great job (I didn't vote for him but could see that he has the background that is working very well for Canada) and the discussion on why he does not make deals with the other parties very obvious really. In an election he would win far more seats because the other parties constantly prove how inadequate they are unfortunately. We need discussion in Parliament not throwing about ridiculous ideas and actually wasting time voting on them. We also do not need an election - a perfect waste of money if there ever was one. Get with it; the Liberals won the last election. The Prime Minister has earned his spurs and he is getting this show moving on to make us tariff proof in as gentle a way as is possible. 

The Conservative leader let the last Prime Minister bait him constantly and he fell for it every time and what happened so much money wasted and expenditures over the roof although I do not begrudge children their school lunches or their day care, people their dental care but the weakness of the Conservative Party is very concerning to me as it used to be the party of economy and trade (social issues are dead in the water in Canada and belong at the provincial level really). You can not fight tariff you must become tariff proof. You can not dictate at the federal level what each province must permit; that is an internal issue that each province must deal with - the province that wants something needs to convince the province that has it to come in and be part of whatever which includes a pipeline (stop trying to create tension where none existed; the MOU was a good idea). We need to be tariff proof and that should be the 100% goal of this government which Canadians elected just a few months ago. Having support with an MOU between the feds and the province simply opens the beginning path of the discussion knowing that there is support for aspects mentioned in the MOU. Get with it Conservative party and lets get this show on the road that will make us tariff proof. I nevertheless expect the Conservative Party to continue being very attentive to how money is spent and to encourage the building of roads (Ontario needs to widen the Trans Canada continuously from Quebec to Manitoba and sooner rather than later). There are many ways that the Conservatives could be pushing to help make us tariff free and we will notice that you are helping; we do not need waste in the Commons arguing over trivialities when there is work to be done that is needed. 

  

The variety of DNA that exists in populations

 Both my husband and I have done a lot of DNA testing but we have never found a common ancestor primarily because Edward is 30% German/30% Dutch/10% French/10% Polish/10% Scandinavian/5% English and other smaller European portions and I am virtually 100% British Isles (with known Huguenot in the late 1400s coming to Somerset). So we do not find one common ancestor although there is one possibility (in a somewhat circular case) but still being researched. Edward shares common ancestry with the American Work family, Eleanor Work (seventh cousin twice removed) married James Burke Roche in 1880 and their great great grandaughter was Diana, Princess of Wales (Edward's ninth cousin once removed) and the possibility that Diana, Princess of Wales is descendant of the Andover Blake family would amazingly see us both related to Diana (I would be 12th cousin once removed to Diana (the published book of the ancestry of Diana, Princess of Wales refers to the Andover Blake family (Richard K. Evans, NEHGS, 2007))  which was sort of amazing when we discovered that in our trip back through time. It struck me as I write this that when I attended a weekend activity at NEHGS where one could work with Gary Boyd Roberts and others Edward really benefited greatly from his time and when Gary asked me what I would like to discuss as my time had come up I said that I was from the Andover Blake family but I was not really into genealogy which surprised him since I had paid to come but I suggested that he continue working with Edward as they were making really great progress into his ancestry and they did that although he did speak to me once again but I really didn't want to discuss my ancestry since my knowledge of it was pretty ancient and I was not into Blake genealogy at that time although I was writing this Pincombe Profile but did not want to discuss that either really. I had a handle on it already but I am like that. I also didn't want to get into a discussion on the Pinkham family as I was about to take on the Pincombe study at the Guild of one-name Studies and did know that the two names were often found together (I was certainly still that person with no actual interest in genealogy beyond getting this profile written at that point in time (after all I couldn't find my paternal grandmother in the records back in 1988 when I was trying to do that for my parent's 60th wedding anniversary book!). But DNA was about to radically change my thoughts and it was coming for sure in 2005 and I was taking my courses at the National Institute for Genealogical Studies but still in the beginnings really of that work! Edward purchased the book on Diana perhaps in 2008 or so but I didn't really look at it until I took on the Blake one-name study at the Guild in 2011. And it was sort of an absent minded look in actual fact and may have been prompted by Edward commenting on Blake being in the index. That particular time Edward was ill and my concentration was poor so my memory of some items perhaps not quite as good as usual! By then I knew that my Blake line had an ancient haplogroup which was dubbed Deer-Hunters by Ethnoancestry so their surname had been acquired at the time of surname useage beginning in England after the Norman Conquest. Although it did sort of make me think because why would anyone choose a surname that was already in use by several known Blake lines. Interesting letting the mind roll back sometimes. 

Since we look at different record sets it was difficult for us to work together once I got inspired to do genealogy in 2003 and DNA certainly became a strong part of that draw. He was looking at records that I did not look at although over time eventually he did get back into his English Ancestry when we traveled to the British Isles. But all of that was a very long way back for him in the 1600s except for one 3x great grandmother who came with her family to Canada in the 1830s from the Norfolk area (Mary Ann Abbs) and he learned a great deal about her and  his line in Norfolk at Kew. So it can be very difficult to work on your lines in repositories when you are so divergent for sure. 

Just before COVID isolation time Edward was corresponding back and forth with Dutch and German investigators and we had a trip planned to both countries but COVID 19 interrupted that and those trips did not happen but he recorded everything he learned in his blog and in his tree. The gene pool  in Europe is enormous perhaps because of the constant movement of populations. Europeans are very healthy people. They follow regimens that contribute to their great life style and they were clever to come together and argue in the EU parliament instead of the battle field (and they do fight on occasion having to be separated but they have made God's words a reality - love your neighbour as yourself and they will enforce that as time progresses). They become stronger and stronger as the days pass. Edward was very proud of his European/British Isles lineage and of his lengthy Colonial American ancestry (he had 9th and 10th great grandparents in his tree with a large number from The Netherlands as well as from the British Isles). His being Canadian was more of a fluke than anything else as people moved west or in his case north into Ontario (siblings of his 2x great grandmother Hannah (Mead) Kipp went west to Wisconsin and further. Canada in 1800 was lightly settled by colonials and there were then as now many many First Nations all over Canada or Turtle Island as its original name accidentally changed to Canada by the first Explorers from Europe to the St Lawrence River (as far as we know they were the first to come along the St Lawrence but there is still much to know of the early history perhaps embedded in the stories of the many First Nations that we haven't heard yet). I look forward to learning many things from our First Nations brothers and sisters now that I am retired and just working away on my books. 

I still have not yet produced the two  missing Newsletters and yesterday I worked away in my available time on phasing the great grandparents working on Chromsome 22 which is mostly finished and I have achieved good lengths for the Knight family. This Chromosome is 51 cM long and primarily the Knight line is verified from 17 to 51 cM with several known cousins. There is an interesting Cottrell match from 37 cM to 47 cM. I do not anticipate that this will be easy. Some of the matches I have looked at do point to a particular great grandparent but I want to have more substance to that with proof in the census since all of these great grandparents appear in the census of England during the needed time period and there are many many trees on the various databases. There are 15 matches still to review and a couple of them are known to me as cousins. Finding the Cottrell was interesting and I will pay attention to these matches and also see if I can trace that particular line back in the British Isles (remembering that I do have cousins who are surnamed or descendant of Cottrell/Cotterill/Cotterell (the spelling still variable in those early census). 

A little more work to do around the house today but it is primarily a research type of day. Perhaps those Newsletters will happen over this time period. I do not have anything to write really in the H11 as there isn't any new news on that subsclade. For the Pincombe again I have not really spent very much time with Pincombe over the past couple of months as I have concentrated on all the lines working on the rephasing of my grandparents now completed although I still need to annotate the charts sufficiently into journal ready items without actually even considering that sort of activity but rather that I put into these items everything that I have found to pass on to the next individual who wants to have an interesting retirement project (namely one of my relatives!). 

Tea all drank and must do my solitaire puzzles to keep the brain sharp. Yesterdays puzzles were amazingly straight forward or my mind was just totally concentrated. We will see today's puzzles. I see Microsoft has announced a 19B plan for AI and data centers in Canada which has been welcomed by the Prime Minister.  Patience is what is always needed and if a western pipeline is to happen there must be a lot of that. The MOU simply sets into motion a methodology to explore but there is a lot of work to do to convince British Columbia that there is a win-win for everybody in this particular item and the Premier of Alberta is prepared to go to the parties affected and discuss. Canada is the best compromising country in the world which I discovered when my eldest daughter and I went to Italy (Rome actually for an invited event; I was invited and she was accompanying me as I had never flown before nor had I ever traveled to Europe). Staying at the organized retreat sort of in a monastery in Rome I discovered that we were the only ones who learned Italian to come (we spent four months learning Italian - mine somewhat spotty as I interjected French when I couldn't remember the Italian word - but my daughter on our first taxi ride (as the metro was on strike) revealed just how well she was doing although she did ask him to go a little slower which he did; she amazed me when on a tour by ourselves she spoke easily with a couple of people from Spain who were speaking Spanish - children are amazing really). That is what Canadians do we compromise until it works for everybody. I prefer an eastern pipeline that is for sure so that we stop paying 3x what we sell the oil for to the United States where it is refined and sold back to especially Ontario - the biggest gas guzzler in Canada and Quebec also uses a lot of gas but it can be shipped there alternatively; no one has to have a pipeline. But the jobs are needed in order to make us more tariff proof. It is by and large the safest way to transport across land compared to water routes but with caution those routes can also be safe. We just have to demand that shippers use transport that is safe and cautious at all times paying strict attention to the weather. 

I do think though listening to comments that we, Canada, must be very circumspect reporting on the content in items sold (any foreign material right down to the smallest screw needs to be identified). But our preference is for all Made in Canada. We should not be using short cuts or cheaper material if it says Made in Canada. Nowadays it is becoming easier and easier to make those sort of identifications as trade becomes much more scrutinized by everyone. This attention primarily to profits is a problem and one that must be looked at as the biggest attention should be on how well the job or the product is when completed. There should still be a sense of a job well done not just that it made so much money. Money gathering and this desire for more and more is a curse very often which was pointed out through the history of mankind many times. But Tariff proof we must become as quickly as possible. I have become distracted and must get to my solitaire puzzles.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cleaning accomplished once again as well as clearing the porch and patio of snow

 Another good working day yesterday and today the top floor will be cleaned. Moving forward into the week on this consistent path is good for an 80 year old I think. Working away on my assigned tasks is meaningful to me. My exercise breaks greatly enjoyed as I am an exercise nut so to speak. All this snow is a treat this year as we waited forever last year for this much snow. Amazing how increasing the work load gives us happiness because we do love the snow. 

We love Canada although I think we need to examine more closely this tendency these days for our political representatives to come out of a Political Science Program and think they are ready to govern a country. They need to actually work I think in jobs that benefit them for this particular method of serving their country. Coming out of the ivory tower of learning is just not enough to prepare them to be in Parliament. Right now we need everyone to be concentrating on growing our trade externally around the world. If a pipeline is to happen; it will happen but there is much work to do to get to that point. You can not force a pipeline through an area that does not want it - compromise has to be found. Wasting time in parliament on pipeline bills when the implementation of the budget needs to be passed is ridiculous. The Conservatives lost the last election they  need to find a way to produce a platform that will win - they need international experience to help grow Canada; they do not have it. Wasting vital time is very annoying. 

The world for Canada has changed and we must grow with it and increase our external trade around the world so that we are tariff proof. That is really what this is all about. But mostly it is making sure that what we do buy is Made in Canada in as much as we are able (we are forced to do that really to make ourselves tariff proof). This is the winter and Canada is covered with snow and the growing season is to come so we buy a lot of food which used to come from our good friend and neighbour to the south but life changes and we can not know whether this access to food will still work for us so we must pursue our trade deals around the world to keep us tariff proof. It was not our choice and we love our neighbours and do wonder what happens to all the products that they sell to us as we are their largest customer. It was the preferred way but we have to be tariff proof. 

 Worked away on the great grandparents phasing and it is interesting. I chose the 23rd chromosome to begin with as it is fascinating to work with especially given the way that it was passed to we five siblings. Three received the usual crossovers and two of us had a slightly different passage with one receiving an entirely intact chromosome for Buller and myself I received 60% Buller to match him and 40% Pincombe which matches the others. It does mean that those nearly 100 matches I have collected over the last decade and a half are very meaningful. For instance the first part of Buller is inherited from my Cheatle 3x great grandmother (Sarah Cheatle married William Welch 24 Aug 1818 at Longdon by Lichfield Staffordshire England and they lived at Birmingham and welcomed six children into the world (three boys and three girls)). By chance two of the girls were twins and the descendants from one are enormous and all over the world and my line also large enough is also all over the world. But this solid length from the start of the chromosome and extending for 50 centimorgans was passed in various ways to Sarah's 3x to 4x great grandchildren (there are different chunk lengths passed but my one brother received in total (as did I) 54 centimorgans from Sarah who passed it to her daughter Ann (Welch) Buller and at this point it was passed to Edwin Denner Buller her son and he passed an intact chromosome from his mother to his daughter, my grandmother (so no Buller passed) and as luck would have it; it apparently then passed to my mother and for whatever reason in combination no change occurred in this Cheatle length but overall Taylor attached itself during meiosis between my maternal grandmother and my mother and this length also readily determined  appears as running from 51 centimorgans to at least 100 centimorgans. The known length beyond that to the end remains a mystery at this time but there is much to look at and it may become obvious over time. This is a length of 55 centimorgans thus far belonging to Buller/Taylor. The Rawlings/Cotterill length I am able to separate portions into Rawlings thus far from 108 to 155 centimorgans. The rest is a mystery but I will work away at it. The Pincombe is actually Gray/Routledge as no Pincombe Chromosome 23 comes to us since my maternal grandfather (John Routledge Pincombe) receives his only X chromosome from his mother Grace (Gray) Pincombe. Thus far I have determined one section only that is Routledge and the rest are labelled as Gray/Routledge. There are a lot of matches but some of them are extremely distant it would appear. But it is that distance that interests me as it helps to lead me correctly back into the past. I have an amazing number of American cousins as I sort through these matches but then I did know that as I also have some close American cousins (2nd since I do not have any first cousins). I have had a number of good conversations (on email) with my American cousins. One notes of course that there isn't any Blake on the 23rd chromosome (X chromosome) since my father passes an intact X chromosome from his mother Edith Bessie (Rawlings-Taylor) Blake to his daughters and nothing to his sons as they receive the Y chromosome. The Rawlings has certainly added an air of mystery to my studies generating a lot of thought for sure. It is interesting that such items do make for a very intriguing study. 

 So that sort of work will continue today and I shall look at the 22nd Chromosome to see what I can see. Some of these chromosomes have many known cousins on them which is very helpful but again this is Citizen Science and the much more crucial Scientific studies remain in the future as DNA will become a very important part of our lives but it does not absolutely control our lives - it is lifestyle that controls how our life flows and we humans with our various foibles work around any limitations that are thrown our way. Some in very amazing ways helped by medical science. 

Tea drank and must do the solitaire puzzles for the day.  

 

 

 

 

A busy Sunday

 I did attend Church online and as always a lovely Service and the organ music was perfect. I do love to listen to the organ. My father could play the organ and occasionally when I was at the Church on a weekday when he was repairing something I would hear him play on the organ. He had a soft gentle touch which was so like my daughter playing the piano years later. I can remember being struck with the similarity in their approach to managing the keys. The Sermon was interesting as all Sermons in Advent are I think. There is that waiting time whilst Christmastide works its way once again into our lives with the memory of the birth of the Baby Jesus. It is the centrepoint of the Christian Life welcoming new life but especially the son of God. God waits for us to catch up and assimilate the words of Jesus given to us two thousand years ago. Will we ever make it to that plain of peace; can greed be overcome and the prosperity of the world be the more important aspect of earning money?

Got right into planning the methodology behind doing the phasing of the great grandparents in a rigorous fashion. I am preparing yet another excel document which will, by chromosome, denote the known areas for each of the eight lines. It is in a way a simple task because I am just stepping back one generation from the phasing already done. So each coloured length belonging to a grandparent is going to be divided into two or more some are very long or it could stay as one but the gradation runs from 0% to 100% and strict thoughts would say 50%/50% but seldom does Mother Nature obey such archaic thoughts as a perfect transmission of 50% from each (I inherited an unbalanced Blake/Rawlings which shows up strongly in my numbers although I did inherit a single Blake only on Chromosome one which is the longest and contains matches that I share with many Colonial Americans having family trees back into the 1600s and earlier for some back into the British Isles. Given my three only Canadian ancestors (my mother, her father and his mother) and all the rest born in England back into the 1600s and most before as far as I can determine (except for the French Huguenot in the 1400s, the Scots in the 1400s); the American cousins do mystify me somewhat but I do have Joanna Blake married to Roberte Sedgewicke in the 1600s and their children were born in the Royal Colony of Massachusetts and remained in this part of the world up to the present it would appear!  The power of meiosis is Mother Nature determining which genes will be chosen from the two sets that appear at Crossover and nature says do no harm so what passes will be the successful gene length with the less successful being discarded. That is how Homo sapiens developed to where it is now. So in each case the weaker falls to the wayside but it is Mother Nature that determines that. But we have much to learn about DNA. I see there are experiments with harnessing the ability of the cell to repair itself which is exciting especially for a child for whom the choice still did not give that child the best chance in life simply because the choices were not excellent. Interesting really. 

That took up just a part of my day as I want to annotate my file for the 23 Chromosomes which will take some time. I see probably a good six months to do an adequate job of that. I must treat it as a submission to a journal article so that I do not miss anything significant that makes it a complete tool. But it is a family document; nothing more nothing less and of no value to anyone outside of a family unit. Our DNA may set us on a path in life but how we live that life is so much more important - avoiding the pitfalls like excessive drinking is really important as I can see that with my maternal grandfather although he died from chronic endocarditis  following a serious flu at that time. My mother always thought he died from excessive drinking and perhaps that was part of the reason but it was an unlucky set of circumstances that took away her beloved father when she was only eight years of age. His father had lived to be 80 years of age and his father had lived to be 86 but Robert Pincombe, my 3x great grandfather also died a young death at the age of 52. For the most part these Pincombe men lived very long lives actually; their genes strong I guess. Life did not record why but Robert's death was sudden as his will was written right at the time of his death. But for John the alcohol was draining for him as she mentioned he had sick days when she was young and her mother learned to drive a tractor to help him out - my grandmother was truly amazing and also fourteen years younger than he was. He always represented the epitome of sadness of the times with his younger brother dying at the age of six months when he was just seven years of age and then his mother died when he was fourteen years of age and his sister a year later when he was fifteen. He and his father did not get along very well which was unfortunate but the farm had belonged to his mother and was left to him and instead of following his dream of being an Engineer and building the Trans Canada Railway he had to leave school at the end of High School instead of going on and becoming an Engineer like his great grandfather Thomas Routledge. His father remarried and had a young daughter and preferred to travel instead of managing the farm. That is a long time ago but the paperwork tells the story and for John Routledge Pincombe I can have only the greatest sympathy for his life was sad; so sad. The book is a tribute to John really thanking him for being the grandfather I never knew but whom I would have loved as much as I loved my paternal grandfather. When I was young most people had four grandparents as I recall but I only ever had two known to me although I must say both of them gave me a picture of the missing grandparents when I was young so that I felt as if I knew them. Their pictures firmly in my mind and one night very recently now I dreamed that my Grandmother Blake came to me and stood beside me and touched my shoulder whilst I was working on the DNA. What did it mean? Was it support? It has taken me a bit of time to assimilate that event. I think it was now and I am finding myself more willing to go forward with the eighth great grandparent and settle on a "likely" name for this individual. My dreams can be very illuminating at times for me as my grandparents slide back into my life briefly whilst I sleep and the memory of things said becomes much clearer moving out of that subconscious where wonderful moments lie and back into main stream. I feel blessed to have such dreams actually. Her youth was so much with her when I saw her in my dream wearing the same clothes as the picture of this family when my father was about six years of age and she would have been 34 years old and my grandfather was 35. The picture was taken in England and Grandpa I think told me what occasion it was but the memory is frail and I can not exactly recall it but the picture I have inserted into this blog. I never noticed before that he is wearing the normal short pants of his age group in this picture. One needs to blow it up to see that.  Perhaps it was his entry into school at that time. Who would have guessed that in just another three years they would all be in Canada. The set of pictures for my father in his youthful days are all reminiscent of time periods that were important (I think many people copied the Royal House presenting the child when they could sit up, then as a toddler, their first school, their passage from Infant School to Regular School and so on by then my father was in Canada arriving just after his ninth birthday). There are still pictures of him as he moved through adolescence and into adulthood but I haven't really thought them through at this time. Each one seemed to be carefully planned. He was an only child. 

Ada Bessie Cotteril (Rawlings) Blake, Ernest Edward George Blake, and Samuel George Blake circa 1910, Eastleigh, Hampshire, England

Tea all drank and must do my solitaire puzzles; soon time for breakfast and it is cleaning day so another busy day in this household.  

 

 

 

Another beautiful Sunday in the Creator's World

 Looking out on the fresh blanket of snow protecting those tender roots under ground is absolutely marvelous first thing this morning. It is cold out there but the plants are protected this year from the savagery of the Polar vortex. Mother Nature was ahead of the game this year with a thick blanket of snow. Global warming is here but in Canada the polar vortex rules the day and it is very cold here. I love the winter for its isolation and lots of time to work on projects because there simply isn't anything I can do about the outdoors. It just survives through each winter by the Grace of God and Mother Nature to spring up again once the cold winds depart and the summer sun works its way north once again. I am  left to wonder many times is the calming Mother Nature stronger than the Polar Vortex? The strength is in her gentleness as each tiny flower erupts from the ground in the spring. That is so much stronger than the cruel polar wind. It blows and blows but in the long run the protections that Mother Nature creates can outlast any polar wind. But why is that? Because, I think, the Creator determines the eventual outcome in the long run and He has told us how to live - love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and love your neighbour as yourself. When that is happening then the world lives in peace and we want peace. Prime Minister Modi of India wants peace; he was very clear about that with the Russian dictator. Freedom is gone from Russia but it probably still exists in the quiet corners hidden away waiting to break through once again and flower. Then Russia can return once again to that glory they achieved which the world acknowledged at the end of the last vicious World War. So many deaths; so many of our youth buried in the battlefields of France. The heart mourns for them and their aim which was Peace in our time has been trampled on. I was born into that desire for peace in our time; when the United Nations formed and we tried to set it up so that aggression would be punished. But the greed crept in once again and it is greed that will destroy our world if we do not learn to love our neighbour as ourself. 

The rephasing of the Grandparents is complete and thoughts of working on the great grandparents swirl in my brain. I can basically use the same setup and simply choose a bolder or lighter colour for the pair and as that stands I would be looking at dark grey for Blake and a lighter grey for Knight, then dark green for Buller and a lighter green for Taylor, dark orange for Pincombe and a light orange for Gray and finally dark purple for Rawlings and a lighter purple and I will have to decide ultimately if that is Cotterill/Cotterell or unknown. The matches will take me there and at the moment I am still ambivalent; there is so much Cotterell/Cotterill already available in the line as matches from the past that are abnormally large because of two marriages two generations apart and close enough at 4x great aunt marrying a Cotterell and a second cousin 4xr Cotterell marrying a Rawlins and some of us have inherited entire lengths of the Rawlings/unknown chromosome amongst the other three which we also inherited as singletons which is apparently not that unusual. Mother Nature is in charge of how all of that genetic material passes and normally chooses the best matchup. It is in this matching that the less desirable genetic code is eliminated and the better is passed (generations that become stagnant lead to disease and so a constant flow of different DNA works better in the long run in the general case - that isn't to say I do not agree with eliminating genetic disease if one can but the better way is to probably marry someone outside of your close family circle which has always been the verdict of the Christian Church for time immemorial). The creation of children is perhaps the most important thing that we do as Homo sapiens along with the nurturing given to offspring (and children do deserve the best that we can provide them although it doesn't have to be the most expensive toy for sure - whatever works best in a family). It is the love that a family has for each other that is really important to their survival as a lasting entity through time. That does make it more interesting to pursue from a scientific viewpoint. The name shifts occurred through time but my cousin in Australia (John Rawlins, MBE) did an excellent job on the family tree for Rawlings/Rawlins. He had taken it back to William Rawlins and Mary Ford whom I believe married 30 Sep 1741 at Wylye Wiltshire and I took it further back to a William Rawlings baptized in Steeple Ashton, Wiltshire 16 May 1669 and the son of a William Rawlings. He did send me all his research and other Rawlins.Rawlings cousins in Australia have continued the search and so far we appear to all agree on this traceback. I am ready through for new research to come up and the advent of DNA does make for even more interesting possibilities.

The morning is passing and tea is drank; solitaire puzzles complete and Church today online if that is possible or I will read the service on my own (already in my reading list).  

What will I work on today? I will continue contemplating the phasing of the great grandparents but I do believe I have come up with a plan that will work. I need to annotate my charts just a little more before I share them with family. I am going to reread the Blake book today as I have latin items that I am translating and will insert into that book. It is time to get back to writing although the year of wading through the DNA matches has been interesting and will continue as I will regularly check the databases - Ancestry has been checked and a few new matches to examine. Living DNA is next and then FT DNA, My Heritage, Gedmatch and 23 and Me although I am not going to write people so it will simply be a look at the match from the viewpoint of whom do they have in common. Perhaps one day 23 and Me will return to their setup as it was absolutely excellent. 

 

 

Beautiful white snow

 What a beautiful sight out of the window - everything covered in white snow. Another snow fall in December to protect the roots of the plants for the spring growth. It is a good thing; last year's December was cruel cold with no ground cover of snow to protect the roots. It showed in the spring. More snow is promised and the skis are waiting to be tried out once again. At 80 I will go cross country skiing once again. Amazing really to my mind but I am thinking of my two grandparents whom I knew so well in their declining years. But they were both very active until they suddenly were not; that is how life goes sometimes. 

A lovely walk yesterday with my cleats on my boots and I really enjoyed the fresh air. It was cold though, still minus 27 degrees celsius with the wind chill but I was dressed for it and just that little bit of my face that I covered with my enormous gloves that I used for clearing snow to warm it up as I walked. It was very invigorating and when I got home I made a cup of hot tea which was thoroughly enjoyed. Although I was not cold except perhaps my lungs were cooler than usual as they sucked in the cold air. The hot liquid quickly warmed the lungs up as it traveled down my esophagus to my stomach and it has always fascinated me when one is cold to feel the hot liquid traveling down one's throat and spreading its warmth through the body. 

I did complete all of the chromosomes but still doing some work on Chromosome 23 with regard to the crossover points since I do not have them from Living DNA. I have those points from Gedmatch and from 23 and Me and created a third set that looked at all the information in the nearly 100 matches I have in Chromosome 23. I am still reviewing that although there were no changes in the placement of the crossovers in this Chromosome. With one brother inheriting 100% Buller in his X chromosome from our mother who received it from her mother and is a mixture of  Cheatle (marriage of William Welch and Sarah (Cheatle) Welch) from her father's mother and Taylor/Roberts from her mother. The portion which is included in the entire first section of this chromosome which my brother inherited  and passed to my great grandmother Ann (Welch) Buller  is Cheatle and was inherited as well by myself and a number of cousins. Chunks inherited by other siblings is also part of this Cheatle bundle that has traveled through time from Sarah baptized in 1795 at Ashby de la Zouch to Canada now in the 2000s. The next section of that chromosome in my brother is labeled Taylor which I also share. The last section of this chromosome is shared by two siblings including my brother and appears to be Cheatle as well; we will see. I have inherited Pincombe referring solely to the four grandparent line at this point. There isn't any Pincombe though it is all Gray-Routledge as inherited by my maternal grandfather from his mother my first born Canadian whose parents were Robert Gray and Mary (Routledge) Gray. I do know that some of it is Routledge as I have matches with Routledge and both of Mary's grandparents were Routledge on her mother's side (Thomas Routledge married Elizabeth Routledge at Bewcastle 23 Jun 1785 coming to Canada in the late summer/early fall of 1818 and my first colonial emigrants (Mary was just 14 years of age at that time). Chromosome 23 will likely occupy me for a few days as I have always meant to have a good look at the matches. It does seem like a misnomer to label sections as Pincombe as no Pincombe Chromosome 23 is inherited by my siblings or myself since my maternal grandfather does not inherit an X chromosome from his father. However my maternal grandfather did have a surviving half sister who would have inherited Pincombe from her father (my great grandfather) but the X chromosome would be passed from Elizabeth (Rew) Pincombe to her son William Robert Pincombe (my great grandfather) and hence also not Pincombe. Fascinating to learn all of this and the learning continues - I have always had a fascination with learning. The other 22 chromosomes though are full of Pincombe DNA passed from my mother (received from her father) to all of us. 

Slept in today; all of that fresh air but everything is done now that needed to be done to prepare for winter which is very much upon us. 

It was good to see our Prime Minister and the President of the United States on good terms at the FIFA event. Our countries have been best friends for over 200 years and some snowbirds have had enough of the cold and will travel, they say, to the southern United States to enjoy the heat once again. It will take a while to get the numbers up to where they were I suspect but gradually we are finding our feet with unemployment now at just 6.5% coming down from 7.1% a couple of months ago. The GDP has also come up but it will take time to rework our trade around the world for sure. 

Time to make tea. 

Twenty chromosomes completed now for the re-phasing of my grandparents

 Just three chromosomes to go and I will have completed this project of re-phasing my grandparents. The changes were except for one chromosome and just one side of it were minimal just a little adjustment here and there to compliment all the testing centres. One small blip discovered on Chromosome 7 in one length only and I will check that out again one of these days; mostly waiting for a match in that area for that one individual. 

The phasing of my great grandparents will begin and lots of data for that especially for Blake, Knight, Pincombe, Rew, Buller and Taylor. There is a fair amount for Rawlings and the last one I still have to be sure I am not seeing the matches of my earlier marriages in the Rawlings line with Cotterill/Cotterell (spelling varies). I did trace the two lines of interest back to a common parent with my Rawlings line having married into the Cotterell line in the mid 1700s and again in the 1800s. A brother of this early Cotterell was the ancestor of the line at Kimpton where my great grandmother was working. The priest recording the surname as one of the middle names of my Grandmother did point in this direction and the matches are coming with the companies suggesting a possible connection. I would say that in general I will look at the data and see where it leads me for sure although in my mind is a young girl and woman who loved her family and really it was never mentioned as far as I know until I was helping to put together the family tree for my parent's 60th wedding anniversary and couldn't find her birth registration or baptism. At this time it continued not being mentioned but the answer was soon found in the paperwork and about 100 British pounds later and a number of documents I had the answer. Myself I loved this grandmother that I never knew and really it does not matter to me; I love her anyway just because she sounds like a lovely grandmother to have had but missed because she died when she was 64 five years before I was born. But my grandpa said she loved the two grandchildren that she knew and that is wonderful that she got to know two of us. The young man of interest in the projected position of being my great grandfather died at just 54 years of age and his cause of death was mentioned somewhere and I made note of it because I have made a medical history of the family. We were blessed with really good genes actually but an inadequate exercise routine life style has taken its toll in the past and one hopes that it stays in the past. They say the youth of today is much more inclined to a good life style and that is excellent news actually. Other than arthritis which both of our parents had and the two grandparents I knew meant that perhaps we would all have arthritis. My answer is to run and walk a lot. It does help. Staying out of the frigid is helpful as well but the walking is definitely good for an individual I think with arthritis. 

Back to the writing of the books to a certain extent now and I did spend a bit of time extracting any new matches but I shall be rather picky these days and just select matches that give me extra and new information.  The days of collecting vast amounts are in the past I believe. I will get my entire genome done once it is set up and I already have a kit that I want to buy but it waits for that. Other than that the DNA is just going to compliment the books where it is valuable. There are some sections of Blake that have passed down through the centuries and I am always alert for Americans with deep Colonial ancestry who match but the matches are so far in the past but they are large and in what is generally referred to as a common area or pile-up area in the chromosomes. I may get into tiny studies on that we will see. 

I have missed doing the Pincombe Newsletter and the H11 Newsletter and will get that done in the next couple of days. All my concentration was into those matches for sure. I learned quite a bit in tiny ways as the changes were, surprisingly except for one chromosome where I knew there were problems and just on the one length, very minimal which I hoped for but was prepared to be corrected if changes emerged. Collecting over 2000 matches during the past decade plus did pay off for sure in terms of a good phasing of our grandparents. 

Today the car goes in for its snow tires and I take it in soon. The radials are good tires and until 2012 we never owned snow tires. I shall be very cautious and the walk home will be lovely. Although it is pretty cold but I will be dressed for it. I had the flu and couldn't take it in two weeks ago I was too sick but someone else desperate for their snow tires would have gotten that appointment so worked out for everybody. I started it yesterday and ran it for about five minutes until is was part way warmed up so hopefully at minus 20 it is going to do the same today. I also have to pump the tire probably we will see if the light goes on. 

Tea drank and solitaire puzzles to do and then the day of research (and taking the car in) begins.  Still avoiding the news in terms of my thinking about it a great deal. We need to become tariff proof and that is the aim. I still think that we need to give some space to the car companies that are afflicted by tariff to do what they have suggested they will do - Canada is a huge market in terms of car buying and I suspect no company really wants to lose it and will try to work around the difficulties that exist and might just be solved when CUSMA comes up for renewal - really everything is a bargaining point. We have a great deal to offer for sure but we must be a more independent country but still every bit of best friend and neighbour to the United States. One cannot share the huge border that we do and be any other than best friends. We have a lot to offer each other for sure (during any cold spell any one in Canada does think about the warmth of the Florida beaches or so many other warm places in the United States). We can outlive the cold but the warmth is nice on occasion! Our two hundred plus year friendship has been something that God wanted to see between His people; I am very sure of that. They are a larger country and like a big brother really but big brothers want to see us be as successful as they are in order to have this continuous land mass stable and efficient and prosperous and best friends. 

First ten chromosomes re-phased for the grandparents

Nearly half way through re-phasing my grandparents and some review of Chromosome 23 matches. So far they tend towards Buller proving that line quite early on to likely be as I had thought it; one entire Buller chromosome passed to one of my brothers intact from his mother and unchanged from her mother who received from her father and it came to Edwin Denner Buller from his mother Anne (Welch) Buller whose twin sister Sarah married to Edwin Withers had a huge family now found all over the world. Anne of course received it from her mother Sarah (Cheatle) Welch giving me a large length of Cheatle that is shared by many around the world. Quite fascinating DNA as it travels from parents to child through the generations. 

Other than the small glitch at the beginning of one sibling's chromosome in Chromosome 7 the re-phasing has been extremely smooth. I marvel at how close I came with that first phasing actually which I have updated a number of times over the past decade plus. The problem is one match that appears to be Blake but really not information to alter anything already in place. It waits for confirmation and perhaps will come one of these days. 

The basement cleaning all accomplished and everything back in place. The basement looks empty; it needs to look empty as it had been full to the rafters on occasion. More downsizing could be seen as I surveyed what is left. I remember telling my husband to be then and later husband that I never wanted to be left a widow; please do not leave me a widow I said to him after he asked me to marry him. It is a sad task to be a widow; to have to manage and be a caretaker of another person's dreams and possessions is the hardest thing in the world really. When a person is unwell you do not like to ask them how they want to manage items and he knew that about me and told me many things that he wanted me to do and they have been done for quite a while now. But the possessions he created that meant a lot to him are just massive in content and will not survive intact because so much of the material in them is about Edward's life. I would say that a comfort in his period of illness was that memory he created of his life from the early days of our marriage right up to the present at the time. He carefully preserved it all and regularly would collect one of those large binders and bring it up to his office and enjoy it all once again (including reviewing all the trip brochures collected and items purchased). Sometimes he would ask me to join him and I would but lots of times he just wanted to enjoy it all by himself. But the children and the grandchildren do not know all those people and the places are not something that mean anything to them and will not because he isn't here to make them live for them (Edward did do a lot of things on his own away from us). They belong to the moving generation these children and grandchildren. They will not create the kind of memories that my generation and those before me created. It will be different because recall is different. You can have it all just on a tablet with a big memory card. Life is and will change rapidly over the next century for sure. All of these pictures are scanned and in files and will never be lost in that way but the originals will have to go through the shredder because they are other people's memories and one just doesn't dump the originals for sure. They need to be shredded and that is another huge task. I am glad that Edward spent all those hours scanning and when he tired of it I scanned a great deal of material for him so all stored away just in case there is that inquisitive child in the future like Edward who wants to know everything about his ancestors. Edward is still very much in his grandson's minds; they loved him dearly.

 Today snow clearing as there is just a couple of centimetres. I will put on my cleats although I did put a mixture on the ice it is safer to wear the cleats for sure. The car in the garage so I do not have to clear it off or de-ice the windows which is a treat. Soon time to ski; the snow looks good and it will be perhaps a white christmas which we are used to having here in Canada. Soon all of Canada will be covered by snow. It is beautiful actually but it is also cold and there is a polar vortex. We are going through that period of shift when the polar vortex covers our area for weeks on end. 

 Tea drank and solitaire puzzles worked. It is early today as the puzzles went very quickly. Eyes a little tired today so will not do a lot of work but I will do some planning as it is time to return to the books. I will work on the phasing of the great-grandparents over the next few months. I am not in a rush but I have not yet pulled all the census material to aid me in my quest from Find My Past, Ancestry and My Heritage. I tend to a look at all of the databases and accompanying material just to see what has been collected by the companies. This is my pleasure for sure; subscriptions to all of these companies. 

The sky is lightening but no wind in the trees. God is watching over His world as always. His creation still intact in spite of the Satans in our midst. We learn so slowly we humans and it is time to move to that peaceful uplifted plain where war is no more; greed disappears and the world will prosper. 

The return of the Indigenous articles from the Vatican ensures that the memory of this great land mass will always be visible in this country and part of its heritage. Thanks to the Pope for making this happen.  Thank you to the Thomson and  Weston families for their winning bid to purchase the original charter of the Hudson's Bay Company with plans to donate it to  four museums here in Canada. This document from 1670 will be part of the historical background of colonial North America. 

 

Finally Chromosome 1 completed

 I did complete Chromosome 1 yesterday and I knew I couldn't resist working on the re-phasing of my grandparents. I did the first three chromosomes. I set up a slightly different set up using Excel instead of Powerpoint. Powerpoint really isn't set up to do this type of table although I liked it early on but gradually could see the advantage of using Excel so I did start that. I still have to work on Chromosome 23 and will probably do some of that today. When this is all completed and I have recorded everything I will give it to my siblings in case they have a descendant that is interested but my daughter will also maintain the files in her lifetime just with regard to actually making sure the files still work! She has her own items to work on. Once I have finished that will be all that I will do likely. I am more interested in constructing these books and will use all of this information as I prepare the family trees. 

Continued today working on the chromosomes and I have discovered a slight blip in Chromosome 7 as I rephase. I will have to re-look at it but the matches do not appear to be there to truly reveal the slight blip. We will see how that goes. I have three sets of crossover data and will see whether there is a blip or not since I can compare the five siblings (thus far nothing points to a change but I have only checked one sibling whose crossover point just didn't quite strike me as correct - fussy old woman I guess. Sometimes it is perhaps how the test flowed for one sibling as occasionally I will see a slight difference between companies in how they interpret the data primarily because they use different points. When whole genome becomes universal then these blips will disappear as there is really only one result that is correct. But as I said this is not yet pure science it remains as citizen science where the proof relies on incomplete information in some cases simply because not all the companies choose the same testing regimen. 

This is also basement cleaning day and I shall go and start the robot to do its chore on the rugs. They are old rugs now although considering I have run on them for years and they had a family of four and their friends on occasion moving around on those rugs they barely look worn. But they were good rugs and I will take them with me when we move. It was one of the first items I bought when I went to work proofreading at home in the early 80s. My a long time ago now and wages were significantly smaller in those days. I never drove the car anywhere that did not involve my work and my husband biked to work and our children walked to school or took a bus. Although I eventually did have two trips a day to take my oldest daughter to Middle School and back in her last year there. It was quite simply a better idea and we could stop and shop at stores and so two trips a day were not part of my working regimen. I used to record all those things; amazing really. But I am that sort of a person and completely converted my husband who did not keep accounts at all when I first knew him. I taught him to do bookkeeping and he was Treasurer at his United Church for around ten years. He loved doing that as his father had done that at his Church. It was sort of a memory thing for him as he went through life since he did not get to have his father after two years of age when his father died in a farming mishap. 

Tea drank and must go and start the Robot; checking to make sure it is fully charged although I do glance at it through the week these days as it does slow me down to have to charge before I use it.  

 

Accomplishment yesterday

Yesterday was a good working day as I accomplished all of the cleaning in my schedule and worked on the matches. I am now down to just  22 matches to do and then Chromosome 1 is complete. When I checked the total in the "too small" category for this chromosome I was surprised to see it was just slightly over 20; I thought I had eliminated more than that. So still a large number in that particular chromosome but more rigorously placed into, in this case, Blake or Buller and primarily Buller which is not really a surprise given the size of the families in the mid to late 1800s. Occasionally Rawlings or Pincombe was a challenge but mostly the matches tend towards Pincombe for whatever reason - a lot of Pincombe have tested worldwide. 

Today the main floor is the designated cleaning area today. It will take all of the morning likely although I have already begun moving furniture to get it out of my way. I like open spaces when I am cleaning. The exercise doesn't hurt either. Laneway all nicely cleaned out for the next storm and a good layer of snow on the ground which will help to protect the plants that have survived my guardianship. Last year we had such a cold spell and no snow cover in December that a number of plants simply did not make it this past summer. The roots may still be strong and they might come up next year; time will tell. 

A couple of discoveries with the matches that were helpful and all the cross over points have been proven so I can start anytime now on the re-phasing of the grandparents which could well begin today. Twenty two matches is not a large number unless I need to sort them out. I do recognize a number of the names as known so maybe a quick trip through these twenty two matches and they are all S, T and W nearing the end of the alphabet. I do love the logic of all of our learning that began so young and stays with us all our lives. Some of us think alphabetically others are more numerical - I like both systems depends on what I am doing and perhaps that is the case with most people. 

Staying away from the news again; it does tend to dominate my mind on occasion and at 80 one can just watch and pray really for the best outcome. It does surprise me somewhat, although it is possibly logical if you are a satanist bent on control and destruction, that the world has not moved beyond the barbarism of a thousand years and more ago. It is done to frighten people but we should not be frightened; God handled the barbarians of the past and He will handle the present ones I am sure. The sight of Russia breaking up and bankrupt saddened us in the early 90s but  now we would just watch and pray that there are good sensible people in Russia (if Putin hasn't removed them all) who will eventually lead that country to the glory that should be theirs but is constantly undermined and stolen by gluttons - gluttons for money and land who care nothing about the people of Russia. Gluttony another one of those great sins of the Christian Church and possibly others - I am not that knowledgeable on religions other than my Anglican for sure.  

 Nose to the grindstone and on to breakfast. The workday begins once again; the traditions of our youth weigh in in our old age as we just do the work that needs to be done and carry on. It is Giving Tuesday today and sometimes you can make your money multiply where generous donors offer to match or even double or triple the donation. Good time to donate where you can find that in your set of donations. 

Why following the commandments Jesus brought us are the best answer

It is all about respect for our fellow man; loving our neighbour as ourself. Without it we are just like the animals in the wild protecting their territory and expanding it whenever they felt they could when the other side was weaker. That is really what NATO is all about; creating a line of respect and fighting back when the respect isn't returned. It was a beautiful aim when it was created at the beginning of the Cold War and has served Europe and the members who support the belief that this world can be a better place where wars no longer happen. It was so simple those words when Jesus brought them to us and created the foundation stone of the Christian Church. But two thousand years has seen viscous wars fought and so many deaths; it is time to move to that uplifted plain of peace. One prays for that every day. 

The sermon yesterday at Church was very very interesting and I thank the priest for his delivery of it. It was especially a really excellent Advent I sermon I think. Advent is the time of watching and waiting for the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ; the memory of his birth comes to us on Christmas Eve year in and year out as we celebrate God's gift to mankind. A gift that keeps on giving through the centuries as we slowly adjusted our societies to a more equitable system but it does take so much time and respect has to be learned by all for all around them. Just because you think everything should go as you want it to go doesn't mean that that would be the way God wants it to go. God wants peace for us and we have to move in a way that creates that peaceful society in this world. The rhetoric has to be for peace not for ownership especially not ownership of people which includes telling them what they can and cannot belong to or how they have to speak; or who their friends are. Peace in our time was the motto that carried our young men and women into a battle where too many laid down their lives for that very peace. We must have it in this century; too many have died trying to give it to us.  Prayers for peace as always. 

Mostly yesterday was a working day - washing clothes and working on matches (just a little, Sunday is a rest day and that includes my eyes which had had three days of research). The day passed quickly and I also cleared the snow from my porch and patio and the top of the laneway so that the company could clear the rest of the laneway and especially the end of the laneway; I am getting too old to move that for sure. It was heavy snow absolutely made for snowman building although I do not see any out the window. The children are mostly all grown around this house although there are a few. Most of the matches going into the "too small" folder because I can not really be sure whether they are Rawlings or Pincombe/Blake or Buller. They are all in that very long length (20 to 40 cM) with either two siblings matching or three siblings matching but without any other match to help or a match in common (and I like there to be a couple of those matches in common) they are probably very ancient in our Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA). They are still interesting and mostly American colonial descendants actually so no more than 10th to 11th great grandparent for the MRCA but that makes us 11th or 12th cousin and who would expect to share DNA that far back that one could actually see as a reasonable length. It is simply a common area shared by many with ancestry back to the British Isles likely and before that to the European Continent and before that to Africa thousands of years ago. We are still learning very much about all of that. So into the "too small" folder but still painted on DNA Painter in each sibling file. 

I read an article published by Nature Communications on the five stages of homo sapiens' brains in terms of age - Infant lasts to 9 years and adolescent from 10 years to 32 years, adult from 33 years to 66 years when early aging begins around 67 and then late ageing begins around 83 years.An interesting compilation by the scholar Dr Alexa  Mousley who led the research. It does reinforce the idea that living with one's parents well into one's 20s is a good idea. I was thrilled to have our children stay with us so long for many reasons; I thought it helped them by not forcing home ownership on them so young and just having to worry about their studies whilst time passed. Then there were the surprises which blessed us as well as we grew in family size (of course I grew up in a house with nine people in it so space was not a big deal with me (plus I lived in the attic all on my own until my baby sister joined me when she was two years of age and I was ten and it does strike me that assigning adolescence to ten seems very logical in my opinion as I became somewhat of a little mother to her). The traveling that Edward wanted to do fitted so well into all of that as he was always conflicted leaving everything behind like that but the house was always full so he happily traveled about the world (when I finally got him to cross the ocean) and enjoyed every moment of that travel. He couldn't get enough of it finally and wanted to travel to Europe every year but I needed time to prepare for each trip so that we saw and did the absolutely maximum we were capable of seeing and doing. Did we miss anything? Well he wanted to go to the opera in Budapest I think it was and we didn't do that but if time had been on his side we would have. But we did do all of the items that he had on his original check list. My only aim was to go to England for the most part and meet with my cousin but I am a bit like that; I do not have a long list of things that I need to see. A picture is good; I am really not much of a spender in that way; neither of my time nor of my monetary expenditures. But having lived through a bankruptcy as a young child it formed different ideas in my mind I rather think. As a young child I was not bothered that I wore my brother's shoes or even clothes on occasion and I rather liked all of that family time when we would sit and listen to my father read a story. New clothes were not something that I missed at all; after all I was the fourth child with an older sister whose hand me downs I wore until I was six inches taller! By then I was babysitting and making my own clothes or buying them. Once  his business was back up and running we would scarcely see him again as he was busy from dawn to dusk so the memory of that short period of time stayed with me as more of a fun time than the slightly perilous time that it actually was. People are definitely a product of their upbringing in many ways but life shapes how we live it I think. 

Cleaning day today and it begins around 9 as that seems to work very well for me. The top floor is the beginning as that is where the vacuum is. I am still using the shop vac and it works very well; actually the suction is great but it does sound like a rocket taking off for sure. The morning will mostly complete it and I will have some time to work on the matches and other projects. I have a meeting at 1 which I will try to remember; I have written a note to myself. 

I am more than 2/3rds of the way through Chromosome 1 matches. Possibly there will be just around 200 matches for this chromosome when I have completed this review. Then Chromosome 23 still to do just for a cleanup as there are  96 there and some are quite small - generally I can work them into grandparent readily especially with two of us so clearly separated into one with an entire Buller length and mine which is 60% Buller and 40% Pincombe with just the one crossover point. The other three are more varied but also easily work into their result. Cleaning that file up will be handy when I move to the great grandparents. The Pincombe comes intact from my great grandmother Grace Gray (blended Routledge/Gray) to my paternal grandfather and then to my mother who blends it with Buller or doesn't as it turns out as it came intact to one of my brothers; the Rawlings comes intact from my Paternal Grandmother Ada Bessie Cotteril Rawlings (aka Edith Bessie (Taylor) Blake) to my father who then passes it to his daughters (it is a mixture of Rawlings and the unknown Cotterill it would appear to my mind still; having Cotterell already in the family with two repeats in the cousin lines at the 4x level and 2x level does lead one to be cautious in how one regards the matches (however there are a number of Rawlings matches in the Chromosome file). It may never be solved; who knows but I am feeling less like I am intruding on my grandmother's life (she was very happy in her Taylor family and grew up with her mother as her mother and her three half siblings as her siblings and especially the bond with her step father was very strong - nice that all of that passed to me as a child from my grandfather) which I didn't want to do but life doesn't always flow the way you think it might. Buller is a mixture of Welch coming from my 2x great grandmother Anne (Welch) Buller who passed a blended (Welch/Cheatle chromosome) to my great grandfather Edwin Denner Buller who passed it unchanged to my maternal grandmother Ellen (Buller) Pincombe and the other part of the Buller passed by Ellen to her daughter Helen (Pincombe) Blake is mixed with Taylor passed to Ellen (Taylor) Buller from her father Samuel Taylor and her mother Ellen (Roberts) Taylor. I must check all of that but the gist is that the chromosome passed from a father to a daughter comes directly from that paternal grandmother without change whereas the chromosome passed from a mother to her child is blended but in significant way which gives matches with a 3x great grandmother of a good length on occasion as I can see the 23rd chromosome portions from Sarah (Cheatle) Welch in my 3rd cousins where our 2x great grandmothers were twins as rather a good length in that Buller line as they are in the Withers line. Interesting really all of this chromosome passing. So one can see the necessity of maintaining this 23rd chromosome as well although it is not used by all of the testing companies in their matching. 

Tea completed and solitaire puzzles to do. November all completed and December begins. A very orderly brain workout each day as it begins.  

Conrad Black has it right once again in today's editorial

The Ring of Fire in Ontario is finally being seen for its huge value to Canada and to our friends and neighbours who, like us, are democracies which aim to be economically stable and militarily sufficient. Interesting that we now share a border with the European Union with Hans Island which is jointly managed by Denmark and Canada. A very small border one might say but it gives one the feel that there is this huge circle of countries that are part of NATO which is a defensive organization created during the Cold War. It has never been an offensive organization and there are no plans that it ever will be but defend we will do. 

But back to the Ring of Fire and its potential for rare minerals finally being recognized in one of the major projects put forward by the Prime Minister as a project much desired and moving ahead. We do need the road though and I will keep saying it until it has four lanes from the Quebec border to the Manitoba border. It is important because the traffic level on it is constantly increasing these days as especially truckers are making the huge journey through Northern Ontario to the west and back again. We need it just like we needed the railway way back in the 1800s. We built that against enormous odds and we can build a road. Toronto doesn't need a whole lot of money spent on roads right now other than maintenance but the North of Ontario needs that road. We can do better than ten years to take it from Arnprior to Renfrew (and it doesn't quite reach Renfrew!). Lets put our backs to the shovel and get that road completed along with the needed railway lines to open up the Ring of Fire. 

Thank you to Conrad Black for selecting this subject for his editorial. The Conservative Party is in power for a few more years here in Ontario and it is their time to shine; you do not have to buy votes all the time with expenditures. We know that we need to move along; become tariff proof here in Canada and we can do it. So "Elbows Up" and get the work done. No work gets done with arms hanging down at our sides. 

Yesterday I managed to finally come to 2/3rds of the way through the matches. I have removed a few because I am unable to really place them into one or the other grandparent line. There are so many it truly doesn't matter but they are still in the "too small" file and painted on DNA Painter so not lost to sight just not cluttering up the file. Two hundred and eighty two matches was always too many in that file and what is in there now is neatly organized and ready to put AI to work to do some items that I want to look at. The time is approaching for re-phasing the grandparents and working on phasing the great grandparents. Probably not earth shattering in general but in my world it is of interest to me along with some other items but it has dominated as it required a few months of intensive work on my part to get the files in shape to use AI. 

Sunday once again in God's world. It is Advent 1 and my Advent message was in my mailbox and I read it first thing. It is exceedingly beautiful and I read it over word for word beginning to end. Alongside Hope (formerly PWRDF) is my prayer group which I try to manage every month although sometimes it just does not happen but I can listen to it later. I missed the session on the Advent messages given by the author but it is now in my inbox and I will listen to that perhaps this afternoon actually. Church on YouTube today as always (providing no glitches) but I have the bulletin in my inbox and will read it if the service does not transmit. 

The days are passing quickly at the moment as there is much to be done on my part. Seldom do I have a no-work time that isn't spent on exercise. The second most important part of my day is the exercise to keep myself active and capable. One must do that when one is over 80 absolutely for sure. 

Another good idea is vaccination for measles. I never had red measles apparently as a child (hard to believe in a family of seven children but there you are) and I did check that with my mother when my youngest was being vaccinated as it was in my baby book which she carefully maintained for each and every child and I got vaccinated for measles at the same time as my daughter. I am glad that I did as measles returns to haunt us. The effect on the unborn child is enormous for a mother who is not vaccinated and has not had measles. The effect on infants is huge; get vaccinated. The world was rid of measles for the most part in many countries. Lets not forget that; the scourge of measles is dreadful. 

Time to make tea and start the day.  

A sad Thanksgiving

The most greatly celebrated secular holiday in the United States was marred by the murder of the young national guard (a young woman just 20 years of age) standing guard in the capital city of her country)and the other soldier with her (a young man) still fighting for his life in the hospital. Prayers for the soul of the young woman and for the young man in the hospital. Why do people do such things in a country that took them in? so hard to understand. It brought back the memories of the invasion of Israel by Hamas in my mind and how it was received by supporters of Hamas around the world. How can one support people who attack other people? Hard to understand; very hard. They are truly satanists and deserve the full weight of the law thrown at them; not support. They must lay down their arms and stop their rhetoric against people. It is their rhetoric that is the problem; if you do not agree with how people live in their own country then you shouldn't be there; go back to what you had and perhaps then you can appreciate the freedom that exists in our countries which you undermine when you support attackers like Hamas. 

Another good working day on the matches although again I move barely forward but now into the K's and will continue today. But I am straightening out matches that were quasi placed way back a decade ago and not really looked at since they had this question mark in them. They do not really help me with my quest because there isn't enough information but they do verify the crossover points often enough as these common areas tend to get passed as lumps; huge lumps on occasion as on this Chromosome 1 they are passed as large 20's or even into the 30's and 40's centimorgans (and their relationship to me in many cases is very distant (23 and Me shows them as 5th or 6th or even 7th cousins!). I have done a little study on this length from a medical viewpoint looking at 23 and Me results and it is interesting for sure. Our way forward in some ways lies in the knowledge gleaned from looking at our DNA and knowing from a young age what you should not do in your life - for instance heavy drinking in your youth is not practical for some people; it immediately limits their health in ways that others are not so affected. Knowing that is a good thing I think but it does require a certain level of discipline that doesn't necessarily exist in our present life-style. The advantage to military service (compulsory) does continue to be an interesting idea for any country I suspect. The regimentation is something that is lacking unless you go into something that is very regimented to build up your ability to use this characteristic of humanity that has brought it along these many thousands of years. But that is my personal opinion for sure. 

 However one shouldn't assume that I think consumption of alcohol is a bad thing. I certainly do, on occasion, have a glass of wine and as an Anglican we have wine at our Eucharist in memory of the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. I seldom drink other liquors although again I do like Cherry Brandy on rare occasions and in limited amounts. I am just a limited drinker of alcoholic beverages usually in the company of my family and never alone as like drugs it does cloud one's judgement and should be avoided if judgement is something that you are going to need going about your daily life. My knowledge of mood-affecting drugs is very limited to a short period of my life when they appeared to be the path forward but left behind when my mind once again returned to me. Was I lucky? probably but it isn't easy for sure. The discipline again plays a role in our life - the need to be alert at all times. 

 My new file has proven to be a useful expenditure of my time and I will construct one for the other three grandparent lines - Buller, Pincombe and Rawlings - when the need arises. It is always a process that grows as I aim towards the actual goal of all of this which is to phase my great grandparents in a meaningful way that supports my tree work for the books. Then I can link the census into my thought process as all of these great grandparents were on those census from birth to death in the British Isles other than my Pincombe-Routledge and Gray great grandparents who died here but appear on the appropriate census here in Canada and I have all the records for them here as there are only so very few of them (my 3x great grandparents Thomas Routledge and Elizabeth (Routledge) Routledge (2nd cousins once removed), my 2x great grandparents Mary (Routledge) Gray and Robert Gray and that is it - Grace (Gray) Pincombe was my first Canadian born ancestor and her son John Routledge Pincombe was my second Canadian born ancestor and my mother Helen (Pincombe) Blake was my third. Interesting really to have such a small footprint but fourth generation Canadian on my mother's side and first generation Canadian on my father's side as I was born a British Subject (my father was born in England at Eastleigh, Hampshire) and I was grandfathered to Canadian Citizen along with everyone else born here by the 1st of January 1947. 

I always felt very British until I traveled and discovered how Canadian I really am. It is good to travel; you learn so much about yourself really in that traveling. I especially loved being in the British Isles where I learned how Canadian I really am and France where my attempts at speaking French were so keenly welcomed and also in Italy where we (my oldest daughter and I) had spent four months learning to speak Italian; she was very good and easily spoke to the taxi driver although did have to ask him to go a little slower because the language was new to her but my few words spoken along with French when I couldn't remember the Italian did work very well also. When I was in Germany and Switzerland my few words of German also came in handy at the time although when the language of English was chosen for the European Parliament I think English has become much more frequent in Europe. But that is what Canadians are; we are very flexible people who try to compromise our way to success as a country  taking the differences and trying to blend which includes being best friends to the First Nations in my opinion. They were here first and have huge knowledge of this country and how life flows here. But they too compromise and one appreciates that as well because they know the way forward is to love the earth and the seas of Canada and help Canada to take care of all of us.

  Another research day and exercise day as I work my way back to the level of exercise that I was at before the flu struck. Do get your flu shot as it does slow down the old for sure and the young. 

Tea all drank; solitaire puzzles completed and time to think about breakfast.  

 

New file

 I decided to create a file of the matches of known cousins just to aid in placing some of these matches that I have; with so much data it just simplifies the lookups that are needed to place some sets of matches where the only match is a common area without any extra matches to aid in placement. That file ended up being 332 lines although there are repeats but it has simplified assigning matches with limited knowledge about the individual. This file was for Blake and I will do files for each of the other three grandparents' matches but no rush on that although Pincombe will be next but generally I can place Pincombe as I have probably three times as many known Pincombe cousins as known Blake. My grandfather loved to talk about his cousins but he was born in 1875 and the cousins that are testing were born mostly from the 1920s on although there are fewer of the 1920s and 1930s these days. So that means the people that he mentioned were mostly born before 1900 as he moved to Eastleigh from Upper Clatford in the late 1890s to work on the Railway as a Blacksmith. Hence I do not know my cousins that well in England or elsewhere although I do correspond with a number of them on occasion. My closest known cousins are 2nd cousins (and they are all known to me by name) since we do not have any first cousins and there are just seven siblings although sometimes people claim my parents as their parents. Probably seven children were enough for them!

Most of my day was spent on the matches for Chromosome 1 although I also used the rowing machine and I ran for 20 minutes as well as my regular 5 min walk every hour and my other smaller exercise periods that compliment my sitting at a desk for eight hours a day broken up by these exercise periods. Somehow I think that my days will always be like this and I find a great deal of contentment in my work although I am a person who can adjust to change very rapidly - lucky that way I guess.  

Lovely dinner of salmon last night with freshly boiled potatoes, broccoli and a little fresh salad. The same tonight as there was enough for two meals. I noticed that I am back to just $75 per week for groceries - not sure why but I do not buy a lot of extras and make everything pretty much from scratch. I finally found a bottle of red wine vinegar for my salads so that was nice. 

Continuing today with the matches for Chromosome 1. I have a couple that are perplexing and I suspect they have both Blake and Buller in their background. I will continue sorting them out today and it was part of the inclination to build this new file set which worked very well actually as I did a quick run through to the end of the matches looking at the named ones to ensure they had been labelled as Blake. All correct amazingly as I do find changes on occasion. I downloaded a great many of those matches way back a decade ago and really didn't look at them a lot because I knew they were in that common area on Chromosome 1. 

Next Chromosome 23 to sort through and eliminate any very small matches. It is a fairly straight forward chromosome now that I have so many known matches there. When I first discovered that one of my brothers had received Buller intact from my maternal grandmother and not blended with the X chromosome my mother received from her father which was the X chromosome that his mother passed to him so Gray/Routledge family it mystified me for a bit that it would be without crossovers as the other brother had several Pincombe/Buller crossovers.  But the Buller singleton did mean that he and I matched on most of the Chromosome 23 matches since I received the first 60% as Buller and 40% Pincombe for the other half but Gray/Routledge family are the matches for this designated Pincombe since my maternal grandfather only receives an X chromosome from his mother Grace (Gray) Pincombe. Fascinating stuff all this DNA. 

Time to make tea and work on my solitaire puzzles.