Winter wonderland

Woke up this morning to the ethereal beauty of a winter wonderland out my window. Absolutely magnificent to look at and breathtaking in its beauty. There is nothing quite like a fresh snowfall for pure beauty. It will melt today although still snowing slightly. But that is the treats one is greeted with in April and they are as much enjoyed as the first falls of snow last year before we started into our long period of winter in the northern hemisphere. 

Cleaning all accomplished for the top floor. The main floor and the basement will be completed today. I also worked on the matches which was quite successful with again a couple of interesting ones. I was able to place one of them with accuracy in terms of actual family line going back to the most recent common ancestor. My set of discards is growing though with eleven in the folder now and I have completed about 30 of the extracted matches. I may look at Living DNA today and see if there are more items to extract. There are a lot of Blake but the hundreds and hundreds of great grandchildren for John Blake and Ann (Farmer) Blake probably predominate. We will see as I go through them. In terms of Pincombe quite a few of the children of Robert Pincombe and Elizabeth (Rowcliffe) Pincombe emigrated with one emigrating to the United States, three headed to Canada, one to Australia, one died young, one remained a bachelor in England and just the youngest remained and his family are located in England. The Rawlings are all pretty much still in England but some emigrated to Australia and a few to Canada. They would be the descendants of William Rawlings and Elizabeth (Lywood) Rawlings. The Buller family has spread all over the world although many still remain in England. But all of my grandmother siblings left England and many of her father's siblings also left England. Two of them emigrated to the United States and three to Canada. But with my first people not coming until 1818 and then the next in 1832, followed by the next in 1850 and then 1908 and 1913 my history on this side of the ocean is relatively short from a genealogical viewpoint. 

Teatime and solitaire puzzles are next.

Cleaning day once again

Monday and cleaning day and it will be the top floor. Separating out the floors with the basement attached to the main floor has worked extremely well. The water meter has a new counter installed this past week and I can put everything back now as it was. I moved everything to give a clear path to the meter and the rugs were moved away as well. A lot of work but I guess a new meter is a step forward in time! The last meter was on for 47 years. The people who bought the house next door appeared to have moved in. 

The Church Service at Hythe on the Dover coast was very much a trip back to my childhood days as the service was very like those of my youth. The priest gestured to the window whilst talking mentioning that you could see the coast of France across The English Channel (or La Manche as the French name the Channel (in English that is The Channel)). That was a surprise as we stood on the White Cliffs of Dover to discover just how close the French shore was. I mean I have seen pictures but being there is something else. We were taking the ferry to France on our way to our European Tour back in 2010. 

The Fifth Sunday in Lent has now been celebrated and next Sunday the last in Lent and more commonly called Palm Sunday as we begin Holy Week which brings us to Easter once again. The most important Feast Day in the Christian Church Year. Prayers continuing for the peoples of Myanmar with a death count well over 3000 now and still searching for survivors but mostly recovery now. Prayers for the Americans living in areas threatened by flooding. That is the new world of the 2000s really where we know everything that happens as it happens and we are part of it because like John Donne wrote back in the early 1600s:

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends`s or of thine own were. Any man`s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind." 

The world has changed a great deal and so many peoples have moved from one continent to another. The largest percentage of those who have moved have been the Europeans but this past century has seen huge movement out of Africa once again as the lands there become so affected by Climate Change. America is and remains the most mixed set of Homo Sapiens on earth with peoples from all over the world forming the nucleus of their population.

Today continuing to work on the matches as I move towards the re-phasing of my grandparent's DNA.  To date the changes have been slight or none mostly but occasionally I do find where I was mistaken in a placement in the past and it is clarified by new matches from second or third cousins in a line that just hadn't appeared in the testing companies earlier. But it is rare for sure. I re-phased every year from 2014 to 2020 and now five years later I am finally getting back to it. I have made a couple of starts at it but time and circumstance rendered them incomplete so back to the 2020 drawing board. I still need to draw out the matches in FT DNA and Living DNA not yet collected. Blake does tend to be the largest set of matches mostly because John Blake and Ann Farmer had ten children and over fifty grandchildren which quickly became over 300 great grandchildren and they married in 1823 so a lot of descendants of that couple. 

Must make my tea, early today just 5:27 am.  Minus 4 degrees celsius and we are in for a colder spell and perhaps snow as well but it is just early April and pretty normal conditions for this part of Canada.

Church at Hythe today (near Dover, England)

All these online Anglican Church services week after week are most interesting. The one this week will be at Hythe (along the Dover coast of the English Channel). I shall attend later. 

Yesterday good accomplishment on the matches into my various recording files. I also put a few into my holding file because they are not complete (missing one or two siblings where the match is a known one from several testing companies). Why, a mystery perhaps but also logical given that the five results are not from the same testing company. One is original with My Heritage (mine) but the other four are coming in from two different testing companies. I have anticipated this already so will have this file that I can look at if I am curious. This match I am currently working on is actually a very ancient match in the Blake family which stretches back probably as much as ten known generations (sounds weird but it does happen that a length of chromosome remains with a family line achieving success generation after generation of expression). Within the Blake line I do have several cousin marriages which have decreased the look of the generational difference as much as five generations on occasion (endogamy). The length (around 30 to 35 cM) does not include anything of a nefarious nature which has also probably given it the ability to express itself generation after generation. These lengths can fool you on occasion but after doing this for more than a decade I realized a while back that I am looking at quite distant relatives with this length and it is shown as a "common built up area" on this particular chromosome length. Knowing that my Blake family was in the same place (Andover and area) probably for thousands of years adds to this persistence (many families in the village of Upper Clatford were related to my grandfather in the latter part of the 1800s). Some really good matches are coming out of this work that are known to me. As I re-phase my grandparents once again their inclusion helps to solidify this knowledge about the DNA material passed to my parents from their parents. The value in it all could be absolutely none or very helpful but it is interesting and one does like to do interesting things with their time. 

Going back to work outside the home in 1994 and working until 2008 full time, the street changed around us here very much with lots of new people. When we first moved here the doctor we went to seemed to think that I could be a visitor to welcome people. I said that wasn't really my thing but I was still recovering from my breakdown and easily swayed by the people who were looking after me. That changed quickly as I found that welcoming people was not really my thing for sure and it only lasted a short time. So I never really got to know the people who live around me and that is still pretty much the case although I have a sort of "Hello" relationship with them. Since I do not want to babysit or look after houses during vacations or do any of the things that my husband did chatting away with the neighbours about flowers and such things; my time is spent pretty much on my own except when my children are here which is often enough although my eldest will return to live with me permanently when that happens. My husband was very involved with the things that interested him like being part of the building of Orleans United Church (he was treasurer for ten years and sang in the Choir for fifteen years or so), he had a number of organizations to which he belonged through the years, but he was very active in the Ontario Genealogical Society from the early 1980s until the 2020s and then his online activities were huge as he belonged to many many family societies in the United States (and some in Canada) with his mostly colonial ancestors (although I did notify them they still send the Family Newsletter electronically). Primarily his families were Patriots (with a few loyalists) and came to southwestern Ontario in the 1800s right up until about the late 1820s they were still arriving. That meant a lot of traveling into the United States (particularly New England/New York/New Jersey/Pennsylvania) which was interesting although eating out in restaurants a lot is not my thing but I did eventually persuade him that we could just go to the grocery store and buy a meal and take it back to the hotel. But we did eat out a lot. Then our eight European/British Isles trips were fun (a lot of preparation which I generally did so that we could see everything that was around the hotels that we stayed at - that worked really well). Although I certainly miss my husband this quiet time has been good for me in the long run. Not a day goes by that I do not think about all of his research through the years and wish that he had gotten to do even more of it but life does flow that way unfortunately. As I went through his material I actually realized that he had not done any new research for maybe four or five years but spent his time listening to music and especially reviewing our trips with the Powerpoint presentations that I made for him (he asked me to do that). For each trip we had a box of items that he purchased (Edward was definitely a shopper!) which he would have out when he was watching the particular presentations along with all the trip books that he purchased along the way (I did notice that he was doing that but thought he was still doing research). I used to extract his DNA matches into a file for him and he was working on that - he had tested maybe a dozen of his cousins to work on the matches - he could see how five siblings matches made such a difference in how quickly I was able to link families. But now the quiet time of life has come to me and I am enjoying it with my work. 

My work on the five siblings matches will be useful for the books as I have reached the point in writing that I would begin the generational chapters. I am still though working on the earlier chapters with the latin documents that I am transcribing slowly but surely. They will take a while but having the two types of work gives my eyes a rest and perhaps my brain too at times. The brain benefits from different varieties of work. 

On to the matches, breakfast already completed and then Church shortly. 

Money

  I think what people are saying is right; this may be one of the most important elections in my lifetime although I can think of a few that came at very tumultuous times. Getting it right is very important. I hope everyone votes; that is the gift of a democracy that you get to say what you feel at this time. Money is the big evil really; the desire for it is huge and people want so much of it.

Yesterday was a good accomplishment day in terms of working on the matches. I created a file for unused matches because some of them are incomplete as I know that there are areas where more than one sibling match and if that doesn't show up then they go in the file although I will look at them. For the five siblings not all of the tests were done at the same company that I uploaded to My Heritage. I did an original test at My Heritage. I thought about testing my one brother who is the most different to me but he was not well at the time and it was the middle of COVID when I had such thoughts and he lived a seven hour drive away from me and generally I took the kits to him myself and then sent them in for him. He passed sadly in 2020 so that did not get done and four of the five kits are from different testing labs where they chose their own particular set of markers to test. However, there should still be some similarity and there is for many of the matches but as I said for some no and these I look at and then file for the future as I can look at them again. The object of this re-phase is the books actually. I will begin the generations after I complete the latin documents looking at the early history and some of the matches reach incredibly far into the past and I will be using that information in the book. For instance I have a number of cousin marriages in the Blake line going back into the 1500s resulting in a stronger presence of Blake in matches beyond the sixth cousin although very small so perhaps suspect but none the less interesting. 

I also went for a lovely walk and picked up a few items at the grocery store which included a piece of fresh salmon which was quite lovely. Along with a sweet potato and broccoli, dinner was quite pleasant. That was my weightlifting for the day as the bag was full (freezer bag) including butter, avocado margarine (wonderful stuff), bananas, oranges, and two fresh tomatoes.  I will eat one of those tomatoes today but the plan was to have it with my dinner but I forgot plus I was stuffed anyway. I am still eating my Banana Bread for dessert so that was also enjoyed. The walk both ways comes to about 3 km and it was a couple of degrees above zero degrees celsius so a perfect day for walking. 

Today continuing to work on the matches and sort them into their grandparent line and into my flat excel files and paint them in DNA Painter. Some of the matches are quite spectacular for third cousins with good strong matches between at least one of the five siblings and usually more. Having such a diversity of results between siblings in terms of inheritance has produced matches on every chromosome with no areas not covered by matches. I am very lucky that way with this information which permits me to fully re-create the DNA passed from the four grandparents through our parents to us. Not having any first cousins looked like a limiting ability to do that but in reality the second and third cousins are providing a huge amount of data. 

Must get my tea and then begin.

Still 200,000 without hydro in Ontario.

 A warmer day in Ottawa today but the nights are still pretty chilly. Hopefully not too much longer before the hydro is back up again for the about 200,000 customers which could mean half a million people or more. Ontario is a large province (the largest population in a province/territory in Canada  of approximately 16 million people). But that is actually good news because there are more people going to the other provinces now since the population of Canada is 41.5 million. Everyone coming here just wanted to go to Toronto and it is just too big now.

My eyesight has taken another small leap as the ceiling has become so much deeper (i.e. it just looked flat before although I knew that it was a "popcorn" ceiling) to the eye, the little blobs of plaster are so much more distinct than they were right after my poor eye cleared from the first surgery. The really big item I noticed before surgery was the sun in March; I used to hate going out in March the last maybe ten years even with sunglasses because the sun was so strong. But that has disappeared amazing really what cataract surgery does for a person. No migraines either which is a treat. I always get this period of maybe four or five days when my eyes feel strained and then suddenly I am seeing even better. Perhaps that is how an infant's eyes develop who knows; they cannot tell us. 

Good progress on the matches and I am into sorting them into my various files, painting the matches in DNA Painter and preparing my "known" matches for re-phasing my grandparents and then working on my great grandparents. It will take a while to work through these more than 300 new matches that I have acquired since 2020. I have not collected the matches in FT DNA for a while, never collected them in Living DNA until yesterday I had a look (extracted one) and of course we no longer can collect that data in 23 and Me. There isn't any data in Ancestry either but I do use Ancestry differently with a lovely flat excel file of the matches for the five siblings side by side and it includes the information on the known matches. They are colour coded by grandparent line as well as a line of text stating the most recent common ancestor. I have  extracted just over 1000 matches from my kit and the kits of three of my siblings. Now that there are so many I may separate out the four grandparent lines into sub-files as the information is useful - many people test at more than one site and the trees on ancestry are quite interesting. All of this looking at phasing/re-phasing does play a role in my book writing as I reached the point where I would begin the generations although I am back in both books writing early history as I read the documents that I have acquired through the years in Latin. My Latin really has come a long way although it is still difficult to read the old text. I did do a small chapter on autosomal DNA in the Siderfin Book just to link all the families together coming down from Robert Siderfin and Elizabeth (Question) Siderfin. I have not looked at the female lines coming down from the cousins of this Robert Siderfin. I will leave that to another - that was a lot of concentration on a 3x great grandmother (Elizabeth (Betty) Siderfin who married John Rew 30 Jan 1792 at Selworthy, Somerset and their daughter Elizabeth (a twin) married John Pincombe 9 Jan 1834 at Bishops Nympton, Devon.

So today more matches to assign. I  must get out the paper recycling as this is the day.