Yesterday was the day that I learned how to play a computer game using a hand held device; well not entirely the first time I did play a game with my grandson where he helped me to make the moves that I needed to do in his game but this time I did most of it except when I was obviously not getting it right. I am not sure that I am meant for computer games other than solitaire though I must admit. I like them to be short and snappy and not take up a lot of time. But we did have a quiet couple of hours working away at that and it was meant to be a holiday - the first day of 2026.
Mostly our television set is used for gaming by visitors - it is a lovely big screen for such things and that seems to be fun for the younger generations. Plus I do watch YouTube for my Church Service primarily but also I am doing a history series that I found very interesting. We often watch nature shows on the YouTube made by people around the world. My desire to travel is pretty much nil but it is nice to see other countries. I have traveled so much though with Edward for most of our marriage that it is just nice to not be doing that so much. He loved to drive everywhere and we did. Once I managed, after more than 40 years to get him to fly to Europe, he couldn't fly there often enough. He loved it; all the different countries where his ancestors had been early colonials in particularly the New England Colonies and New York back in the 1600s. His earliest ancestors came to New Holland and lived at Albany and in New Amsterdam now New York.. In our travels we visited all the areas where the Kip family lived amongst others and they were numerous. It wasn't until he really had time to get into his own genealogy that I realized how many of his ancestors (and our daughters for that matter) had lived their entire lives in the colonies of the now United States of America from the 1620s on. When he tested his autosomal DNA he had thousands of cousins really from the beginning of his testing. As the results proved his trace back in genealogy he felt very happy with all of his genealogical endeavours and certainly visiting NEHGS in Boston was part of that. We went to a weekend get together where he worked with Gary Boyd Roberts who helped him with a couple of tricky ancestral lines but for the most part his work was very accurate.
So I am now into Chromosome 9 and it is also an interesting one with a number of matches. For the most part Chromosome 10 is going to be a lot of genealogical work on the trees of the people who match with long lengths of Rawlings/Cotterill and Buller/Taylor. But equally I do not have all of the Blake/Knight separated or the Pincombe/Gray. I have built this latest excel file in just one so that I can eventually sort it by the name of the match and simplify marking the great grandparent as I have not taken the time to do cross research between chromosomes since there is an easier way than spending all my time flipping back and forth. I have numbered the file so that it can always be resorted back into its original layout. In the case of Chromosome 9 I have eleven cousins known to me in terms of their relationship to me and our MRCA. Every grandparent is covered with the exception of Rawlings so there will be some work there but that too will be in the future as there is little point in my doing abstract research daily when I can put it all together at once and work on it. But overall this has been a good experience going back to the great-grandparents as they are all on the British census from 1841 on and one is on the Canadian census (my first born Canadian ancestor - Grace (Gray) Pincombe mother of my maternal grandfather John Routledge Pincombe. I always find myself thinking about John and how sad his youth was but my uncle said his father was a happy man with his family. He was very proud of his children and wife my uncle always said. He was over six feet tall and had been a very popular bachelor and did not marry until he was 41 years of age. I imagine many people were very envious of my grandmother and she was fourteen years younger than he was although still she was twenty seven when she married. I have pictures of them in those early years of marriage from my half second cousin which was very nice of him to share with me. George DeKay, my Gray third cousin, who persuaded me to write the Pincombe Profile did set that up. I did actually work at writing books in my younger days and surprisingly have returned to it. But it was kind of my cousin to loan the photo albums to me and I scanned them over a weekend when we came to meet with my Pincombe cousins in advance of writing up the Profile. Since my line had not stayed on the farms I did feel it should principally be about all of them as some were still on the original farms.
The Prime Minister is going to France to be part of the Coalition of the Willing trying to bring peace to Europe once again. Although some complain about the expense to Canada I think the money that we have used to support Ukraine has been money well spent. We are building up our own defensive industries just because peace is not with us and the only real way to have peace is to always be ready to defend ourselves against aggressive peoples. We do not want war; we as a country have never been aggressive; we have buried far too many of our youth on distant shores. The torch they passed to us we must hold it high and do our best to keep the peace that they died for; the generations that followed them. Life was very different in Canada when I was a young child; we were a very militaristic people very conscious of our need to be ready. We have become like that again. Threatening us with nuclear war is just ignorant and we all know the result of nuclear war but perhaps not; perhaps some people think they can hide underground no ideas on that but the waste of the world that God gave us would not be as He desires. Of that I am very sure. But He waits and watches and His simple words continue to ring down through the ages - love your neighbour as yourself.
So today continue with Chromosome 9 heading towards Chromosome 1 and it is the New Year and time marches onward and must get back to writing the books. I am ready for that now and about to start transcribing some of those Latin documents that have sat on my computer for over a decade. However they still appear to be in good shape but if not I will order them. There are some that will not benefit me I can see that now but they looked interesting.
Tea drank. Solitaire puzzles done and I am late for breakfast.
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