David saves Saul's life a second time.

 The meaning of David saving Saul a second time points to the value David places on Saul having been anointed by God. God made it possible for David to come right up to where Saul lay sleeping and to take his spear and water bottle and leave without waking anyone. But David did not believe that Saul would ever stop hunting him to kill him and Chapter 27 sees David seeking asylum in Gath. An interesting story within the last chapters of 1 Samuel. David in pursuing the raiders of his home in Ziklag had left behind 200 of his soldiers to manage the baggage as the other 400 moved quickly without encumbrance to overtake the raiders and rescue the people of Ziklag who had been taken prisoner. David was successful and when they returned to the 200 guarding the baggage the 400 said they would not share the spoils of war but David said that they would share with the 200 guarding the baggage so that all benefited that were part of the company. Another battle was ongoing between the Philistines and the Israelis and Saul was wounded and asked his armor-bearer to take his life but he refused and Saul took his own life. In this battle Saul and his three sons perished including Jonathan. This continues to be an historical record of the times of the Kings of Israel and their neighbours. 

The Church Service did not come up on Youtube so I went to Christ Church at West Wimbledom which is southwest of London, England. A lovely church service very reminiscent of my Home Church of St Andrew Memorial in London, Ontario. There are a number of Anglican Services online although I generally attend my now Home Church of Christ Church Cathedral online. The possibility that I will ever attend in person is pretty much nil although in the back of my mind it is one of my backup thoughts with regard to how my life goes. I prefer the solitude of my life except that includes my family as and when I am with them. Soon the dogs will come and stay with me for two weeks. 

Working away on the 23 and Me matches and extracting that information on new matches in the last couple of years. There are several very good matches known to me by their cousin matches which I already have. Thus far they are primarily Rawlings which reveals to me some areas on the chromosomes that are Rawlings rather than Cotterill including some X Chromosome matches always very interesting and one new one is the longest that I have for Rawlings. Tempting as always to write but probably I will not. Mostly these matches are people living in England at this time. 

Yesterday was a very busy day as we had an item to return, kayaking and a walk to do and then grocery shopping and finished up the day with clothes washing - two loads in all.  Today has a slight promise of rain and some sun and we will see how the days goes. 

Still looking for the Allen material and I wonder if I have to go through all of those boxes to find the pictures. Strange really as Edward was very organized but by 2019 he was finding it harder and harder to work away at these items. He mostly watched the television and found being house bound because of COVID coming very soon after the end of 2019 really intolerable. He loved to be out and about mostly shopping. Edward loved to shop. He was very good for the economy. 

Solitaire puzzles to do.  

 

The weather took a nosedive in temperature

Woke up in the night and it is 8 degrees celsius after temperatures in the high 20s but it is still May and the weather can be cool sometimes but I think the changes are much greater from highs to lows than in my youth. The weather is not as predictable and a low of 2 degrees celsius is predicted. However the house is still at 24 degrees celsius so will leave the system as it is (air conditioning is on but the temperature in the house is unlikely to go below 23 or 22 by morning). Always nice to have some cooling for sure after a warm spell.  

It was good that the Prime Minister met with the Premier of British Columbia. They needed to chat about items for sure as Alberta has been dominating the news for a few weeks but the pipeline is starting to feel real and it will be a good boost for Canada and help with this retreading of our economy as it grows around the world and less dependent upon our neighbour the United States.  But still it benefits both of us to trade with our closest friend and neighbour as it is an easy transport from one to the other. 

But I do like to see us standing on our own and in unison with the First Nations. Our path forward is together into the future the First Nations and the people of Canada - the best will happen to Canada with such a partnership. 

Back to bed; woke up for a bit but sleepy again. It will soon be dawn as the sun rises early in the late spring as we work our way towards the longest day. 

Will likely add to this when I wake later. No work done yesterday but hopefully some today as this is the first research day following the cleaning.  

A beautiful sunny day has erupted and that is great. The trees are pretty much in full leaf now although the tree at the front is the slowest. I am checking it for dead branches and will have a company come and trim them out once the tree is fully open. The maple tree at the back looks great and I think all the dead wood fell off in the winter as I hauled great amounts to the front to break them up and put them out for recycling. Since the bags were at least 30 pounds and two went out that was a lot of wood plus the long thick lengths that I had cleaned off went as well. I do not need big walking sticks which is something they are good for as I recall Edward making several good stout ones for all the walking that we did in our youth. 

Today finish off the seven matches still to do and then get to work on that great grandparent phasing table. It will be interesting. I have now purchased Microsoft 365 and will use copilot to work on this file in coordination with the matches file which contains a couple of thousand individual excel files that have matches in common entered into their individual files. We will see the power of AI at work saving me hours of time comparing different matches and sorting out some of the ones that have not yet broken into the great grandparent lines of Blake, Knight, Cotterill (and I may have narrowed this down actually we will see), Rawlings, Pincombe, Gray, Buller, Taylor. The fun begins so to speak but actually the logical path back in these eight lines all of whom appear on the British Census of the 1800s except for Grace Gray who was my first Canadian born ancestor in 1839 (her parents Robert Gray of Holme on the Wold, East Riding of Yorkshire and Elizabeth Mary Ann Routledge of Bewcastle, Cumberland. Margaret Routledge (Elizabeth Mary Ann's oldest sister) married  Thomas Carling in London Township in 1820 and they were the parents of Sir John Carling (Grace Gray's first cousin) who was the Minister of Agriculture amongst other duties during his political career in Canada. Amazingly really to have so few Canadian born ancestors (Grace's son John Robert Pincombe and his daughter Helen Louise (Pincombe) Blake  (my mother)). Working on the great grandparents in terms of relationships gives me greater depth into the past as I work on my books in this case it is the Blake and Pincombe books but time may be mine and permit me to also do the Buller book of my maternal grandmother and the Rawlings book of my paternal grandmother. It is unlikely that I would ever do a Taylor book (wife of Buller) or the Cotterill book (father of my paternal grandmother). But I would continue moving backwards in time selecting two books at a time and working away on them so long as that is practical for me. 

Exercises completed and breakfast eaten so moving on to the Solitaire Puzzles as this is a mixed up day because I had a lovely walk in the middle of the night when I woke up and wrote the first part of this blog for the day.  

 

Busy Day yesterday

 Spent most of the day cleaning actually but finally got to doing some work on the new matches. An interesting one that was just 9 cM on Ancestry but 22.l cM on Gedmatch. The names absolutely nothing comes to mind and the countries in the family tree Ireland and Maine, USA dating back to the late 1700s. Since it is a paternal match and not a Blake I just made a file and I entered it into the databases. Just interesting and I have a dozen matches in this area where some are known to be Rawlings/Cotterill. For the second sibling match I have double that number so will have a look to see if there are any clues. 

Avoiding the news again but certainly that was most interesting to discover the name of the new Governor General to be. She will be fantastic. Thank you to her for serving at 79 years of age. Wonderful of her to do that for sure. 

Cleaning day today and it is the top floor and then finished for another week. Sometimes I feel like I spend half of my week cleaning but actually I usually manage to complete each floor in half of a day. 

Today 13 degrees celsius is said to be the high temperature so a cool May thus far and it is going to rain. Looks like rain.  

I am starting to make a list of summer projects so that I get the gardening done. Each year I like gardening even less. It was something Edward enjoyed very much and through the years I sort of gravitated towards it as we did it together. Now on my own I have little knowledge of gardening; barely recognize the plants that I am weeding around and generally prefer lawn. Interestingly Edward said to me to just grass it over as he knew I would try to keep it like he liked it. I am gradually moving to that for sure. 

Trees are budding now and soon we will be awash with leaves. Canada is a lovely country and the founders certainly had good ideas. They knew that incorporating the treaty rights into everything would protect Canada and so it does. Our First Peoples are great thinkers and doers. I will always remember our trip to Moosonee. Going to Moose Factory Island by water taxi was a wonderful experience and our time on the Island greatly enjoyed. We also traveled by canoe to James Bay along the Moose River which is a trip of about 20 kilometers. One of our sightings was a white wolf; absolutely majestic on the shore. I forgot to be frightened actually the view was so spectacular. The bird life was absolutely wonderful. When we canoed all those years in Northern Ontario we were mostly just north of the Trans Canada and did not go that far north because there isn't a road anyway all the way there. 

Soon time to clean; just have to do the Solitaire Puzzles.  

 

 

 

The Budget Bill passed

 It should have  happened in December before Christmas break and I begrudge the time wasted about 2 and a half months that things could  have been happening. We need to move along and be quicker doing things. There are people unemployed and we need to get these ideas going so that they are employed. So that we are looking for workers and not having people without jobs. I have little patience for criticism at the moment. 

I did listen to the talk given by the Conservative Party Leader and there were some really good points there like working with the current government and getting it all done. I think of this as a Unity government at the moment and anyone who upsets the apple cart will find at the polls that most Canadians want these things to happen and as quickly and carefully as possible to give the greatest benefit to the Canadian people. That is what Confederation was all about; benefit to everyone in Canada. The provinces are simply a tool to make it easier to handle local issues; they are not autonomous and if you do not have enough money for health care then bring in a health tax and stiffle the complaints. 

I go to a doctor maybe once a year and the $750 health tax I pay is barely scratched by that visit although overhead affects this for sure as rent/equipment costs money and doctors pay for their own clinics (plus I pay more than that monthly in Income Tax which also goes partly to health care). I am actually part of the Ontario long term medical study and have to get my blood work for that and will very shortly when one of my daughters has time to take me. It is not that far away to drive but I have never given six tubes of blood and then driven and this is not going to be the first time when I am 80. Looking forward to the results of that test actually. I sort of think these days that people should know how much a doctor's visit costs even if the system is universal. Generally I think doctors are underpaid often enough for the work that they do. I like and dislike universal health care - it becomes too soft a cushion and one doesn't regard the actual cost of their medical care. Yet I do not want to see children without health care wandering about and it is a measure of a community that the people who live in it care for the people that live there. 

We have to be careful when we are over 75 and driving I think. Extremely careful with our mind totally on the road at all times and not to drive if we are tired. It is a must and if you fail to follow that you should not be driving. The world depends on that driver behind the wheel being aware at all times; no drugs and no drinking of alcohol.

Yesterday I worked away on Ancestry with some work on Gedmatch. A few more very interesting matches on Ancestry with Cotterell cousins and given the frequency of Cotterell on their side the matches were quite good for sixth cousins as they traced back to William Rawlins and Mary Ford (my five x great grandparents) through their daughter Mary who married Stephen Cotterell. They have a good tree and now I have all the children of Stephen and Mary which is so very helpful. There was also a long length of shared matches in Ancestry also very handy. Is the Cottrell family at Upper Chute/South Tedworth related to this Cotterell family? Are they both related to the Cotterill family at Kimpton (and I think Stephen is by the records I extracted but I am always looking for anything that contradicts any of this research). I do like it to be correct. So that made the day very interesting and obviously I do have Cotterell DNA (unless they are in a common area but that is the treat of Ancestry as they remove common lengths with TIMBER so generally your match is a true match with a similar family line). Since my only connection would appear to be through my paternal grandmother the priest recording her name as Ada Bessie Cotteril Rawlings was capturing what he believed to be true plus she was registered with that name and I must check the dates on those two items. I think the baptism was before the registration actually. In both cases Rawlings should have been Rawlins as her mother was baptized as Rawlins and Cotteril should have been Cotterill if the father was from the village of Kimpton. So very interesting and I am avoiding it looking like a soap box opera as far as I am able and sticking to facts. 

My mother used to watch all these soap box operas on the television and when I used to get home from university she would say come and watch and so I did a few times just to give her company but it gave me a dislike for soap box opera and whenever politics or anything begins to look like a soap box I avoid it if at all possible. 

Collection Day and I have already been outside to put the collected items out to the curb. This is the first time I have put out a garbage bag (I didn't even bother with the container which generally sits way at the back of the garage) which has basically one white garbage bag in it which has dental floss for six weeks, a few bandaids and the furnace filter which I checked and it is garbage not recyclable. Amazing really how much is being recycled. I am busy using the bread bags to collect up the smaller plastic bags from freezer goods and others, I use one of the yoghurt containers to collect up the small tinfoil, flexible plastic lids and the like, items that look like paper but do not tear so have plastic in them and then I put that filled container into the waste container and start a new one. It is starting to look neater when I put it out to the street but it all recycles. How wonderful that is. I do want to start buying my meat in butcher paper though although having these sealed plastic containers gives it a longer shelf life so it becomes problematic and I understand that. So I use that method when I want a little more time and the butcher paper from another store which generally has that for immediate usage. A new company has been formed to take care of all that addition to recycling; great for business. 

We are a country that produces boxes and other paper containers and we need to move to that where it is possible. It is easy to recycle paper. I can remember life without plastic bags so it can be done but it is more difficult to keep items fresh, to keep brown sugar from caking and there are other examples. One step I have taken is to use a freezer bag for storing brown sugar and wonder if a movement towards brown sugar in paper bags would work and just store it in the freezer bag. It can still clump in the lighter plastic but the freezer bag does a really good job and you just wash it and I have been using the same one for a couple of years now. 

Today I continue working on Gedmatch as Ancestry is mostly complete although will check for new matches and I am going through the four accounts that I have for siblings and looking at all the Common Ancestors and placing them into their coloured groups for ready recall in the future. That was how I located one set of Cotterell (sixth cousins) sharing 20 cM as my cutoff is 23 cM in Ancestry which can be quite a large number and likely I am missing items between 18 and 22 cM and in particular this one but I can only do so much of this and I have a lot more to do. 

Drinking my tea and time to do the solitaire puzzles.  

 

Cleaning Day two

 Today it is the main floor and I will begin in an hour or so. It is minus 17 degrees celsius and the ice is building up here and there. Yesterday was busy although I did not accomplish a lot with the ancestry matches. I continued to check out the match with a South Newton Blake family. I will do a bit of searching on that as I have collected quite a bit of material on the South Newton Blake family including all the wills. They just always struck me as likely being descendant of the Calne Blake family. Some of the family sizes were large and certainly land was passed to the eldest and any monied items in order to keep it intact. I can understand the principle and it worked well for the times. Generally the other sons went into the military, the church or business as that grew to be a suitable occupation. Other sons stayed and worked for the eldest. That was just the way of life. 

One other item caught my eye and it was in the Cottrell line. A large match with a Cottrell family at  Upper Chute, Wiltshire and is located 3 miles NE of Ludgershall and 7 miles NW of Andover and interestingly 7 miles north of Kimpton. I am, as I said, ambivalent about the father of my paternal grandmother. Interesting that the young man similar in age to her in this family is also named George. But why did the priest use the spelling Cotterill on her baptismal record - strange really. I will have a look at the records on Find My Past and investigate. This is sizeable at 54 cM on ancestry considering the use of TIMBER. This is primarily though a Northhamptonshire family so was surprised. The furtherest back is a John Cottrell born 1804 at South Tedworth, Wiltshire. The shared matches are certainly interesting and include my two brothers tested at Ancestry. The other question of course is this a descendant of Stephen Cotterell and Mary (Rawlins) Cotterell where Mary is one of the children of my 4x great grandparents William Rawlins and Mary (Foord) Rawlins. Knowing that their daughter married her second cousin a William Rawlins leading to a possibility of large matches if I happen to actually have Cotterell/Cotterill/Cottrel DNA inherited from my grandmother. But this is the largest match that I have had thus far. This George Cottrell married in 1879 in London but in 1875 he is named as the father of a daughter in London (my grandmother was born in 1876).  Very very interesting that the name is George perhaps and close enough at just seven miles away. His marriage appears to be to the mother of the child born in 1875. Wouldn't that be amazing to find a solution. The only way that I am going to match a Cotterill/Cotterell/Cottrell is through my grandmother as my tree shows thus far. None of her direct line ancestors though are Cotterill/Cotterell/Cottrell that would have passed DNA to her. 

So Ancestry, as always, proved to be most interesting and I always check my matches there simply because of the vast amount of information that comes with the match even though it lacks the actual area where I am matching on an individual chromosome. 

Charging up my FitBit as it was down to 30% and I generally charge it as soon as I notice that it is 30% or lower. Sometimes I do not notice until it starts to send me messages but generally I notice before 20%. It is now up to 92% and does charge quickly this new one. The older one was taking somewhat longer to charge so another bonus in having a new one. This is a Charge 6 and the last one was a Charge 5. I have been a FitBit user for a lot of years now but about seven years ago I stopped using it for almost an entire year because I felt like it was driving my life. Now I have a different attitude to the FitBit and how I use it and perhaps one has to progress to that. 

So this looking at matches I have missed over the last year as I work away is proving to be most interesting. I have my lists for the others but I do like to go into Ancestry first and then have a look at GedMatch and then start pulling the matches that I found in the other databases. I am looking for anything that would upset the applecart so to speak. But also for anything that is new and adds information that I have been thinking about and Ancestry has certainly filled the bill on that one the last couple of days. Just a few matches to go there and I will be into even more indepth looking as my excel file will be built completely with all of the sibling's results filled in and any MRCAs noted on the Ancestry matches file. 

Tea all drank and must do solitaire puzzles, then breakfast and cleaning.     

 

And another Tuesday also a working day

Yesterday the basement cleaning went very well and was accomplished in good time. I even had a 25 minute run before lunch. This is just running around my indoor track so to speak (I have created it with so much furniture gone now). I can see why people did not always have so much furniture in years gone by - the space is wonderful. I did grow up in a house that was post-bankrupt when money was tight but my father had time to read to us which was lovely (that was after my grandfather died I think). I used to read to my grandfather and he loved that. I can not really remember if he read to me perhaps he did but the memory is lost to time. But  he loved it when I read to him. But mostly he liked to talk and tell me all about Upper Clatford (and other places in England that he had been in but mostly he talked about Upper Clatford and not Eastleigh where my father was born). Sometimes he talked about Eastleigh but not a lot. 

I have completed the R's now in the matches and into the S's and there are perhaps 34 matches left to do. I am just guessing because I did not count them and there is just one page of matches to go so about right. It may take the two days though that are ahead of me for cleaning. Today is the main floor and I will not run today. It is more work to do the main floor because I do the vacuuming, the scrubbing and the dusting. It takes about three hours or slightly more in total. But it is finished when it is finished. 

My fingers are itching to get at the file now to sort it to suit myself and see how many great grandparents I can successfully pull out of it. I know that Gray and Knight are fairly clear and if it isn't Gray or Knight then it is Pincombe or Blake but it has to be definitive to make that call. The Buller is sticking out not too badly as well and again the same justification if it isn't Buller then it is Taylor. Rawlings I have quite a few matches and if it isn't Rawlings then it is my Grandmother's father said to be George Cotterill but I remain on the sidelines on that one. I will simply have separated out that individual where it is possible and await a good match to really determine that. It may not be in my lifetime. 

The Olympics is going very well with lots of winners. I like that actually when many countries win a medal. It is a powerful message for the athlete to take home to the people in their country (any medal is a powerful message).  Sixth four percent of the medals have been awarded so still quite a bit to go. Twenty six countries have won at least one medal. A lot of cheering when the athletes come home even if they did not win they competed and that is the most important part I think. I used to sit and watch for the entire time period but life is busy and I do want to get the books written and so I just check in every once in a while when I am doing my ten to fifteen minute walk every hour. The FitBit buzzes me to tell me if I have not yet done my 250 steps for the hour and up I get and do the 250 for that hour and the 250 for the next hour except I notice generally that I have been sitting a long time and so up I get and often I do do the 250 at the beginning of the hour! Exercise is wonderful especially for the young but the old benefit too. As I look around me I think anyone under 55 is still young  really. Then I see 56 to 75/79 as middle age and old is definitely hitting 80. Somehow you feel the difference. Perhaps it is the necessity of redoing the driver's license although it was just the eye test after all that brings the age of 80 home to you. 

 The Buller family is huge I am discovering and a lot of that hugeness is actually in a cousin family not my Buller line. One might say that the Welch family is huge (Henry Christopher Buller married Ann Welch and she had a twin sister who like her sister Ann had a very large family (between them twenty four children)). The number of grandchildren was huge and it continued through the generations as I have so many cousins who match me on this Buller line of mine and for them it is a different surname but we all share the Welch (but William Welch and Sarah Cheatle (our most recent common ancestor were my 3x great grandparents and so are not in that level where I am separating out the eight members (namely the great grandparents of whom there are eight). The Taylor line (Edwin Denner Buller married Ellen Taylor) is considerably smaller which is a surprise although it appears to have this huge Irish branch so still working on that but it is likely the Irish portion that is found in all of my siblings including myself. The only confusing part in that is my portion tends to be from the Irish Republic (Eire) and their portion from Northern Ireland. All in how you inherit the DNA and I am the most different from all of them - if there is a place to differ than I do although I also have the usual amount shared although it is on the lower side rather than being strongly related to each other. 

Time moves onward and my tea cup is empty and I need to do my Solitaire Puzzles. Had a great time playing Sudoku last evening with I think four of five games. Sometimes I do that. I love the thought process; it completely occupies the brain as you look from square to square and length to length to find that one item that will unlock all of those numbers and there you with a complete nine square Sudoku neatly arranged and finished. No flashing of light but I still miss doing my sixteen games of Spider every week. I did it from its inception as a new challenge until I stopped. I hope to return to it one day when my eyes have adjusted to sparkling. One never knows. Breakfast and then cleaning follows. Generally I begin around nine o'clock.  

I had a request for Rathbun/Rathburn information the other day from one of Edward's likely cousins in the United States but we did not go to the graveyards in Pennsylvania (that was planned but did not happen as COVID did) and I could not answer her question. It is sad to write that Edward has passed away; that sadness remains as I did really want him to be 90 like he wanted to be. It is not a morbid sadness he would not want that but rather a genuine sense that he had missed out on turning 90.  I wrote and thanked her for her kindness in her note back when I let her know that Edward had passed and I did not have an answer. 

 

Two Newsletters

I do have two newsletters to write - H11 Newsletter and Kipp-Kipp Newsletter. They are both looking only at the DNA groups within the FT DNA study. I shall work away at them today. I always mean to do them as I used to a couple of days before the due date but writing books has distracted me from this task the last year or so.  In the case of the Kipp Newsletter I really do not know this family (it is my husband's family) and feel somewhat in left field working on it although I always did write a portion for Edward on the yDNA study that he managed at FT DNA. I took it over until someone does come forward to take it on. 

The basement completely cleaned yesterday and today it is the main floor and soon will begin that process. I also worked on the matches and I am about 1/3rd of the way through at this point I think. A new Rawlings/Cotterill match where the testing was at 23 and Me so a nice list of Relatives in common in this last batch. An interesting find in that the  Farley family does appear to have a Knight connection. This actually would be a step forward in solving one of my largest matches outside of family so we will see how that flows.  David Farley (son of John Farley and Mary (Yeates) Farley) married Mary Ann Blake (daughter of John Blake and Ann (Farmer) Blake) 12 Jun 1853 at Upper Clatford, Hampshire. Two known Blake matches were very handy as well. Today will see me working on the J's and there is a long list of them. I hope to complete Chromosome 2 this week and perhaps into Chromosome 1 which has over 250 matches and will take a good week or two to accomplish but then complete and I can start to use the file in ways that should give me interesting tables to explore with regard to the four great grandparents being noted in this particular rendition of the phasing as they match these five siblings tested (five tested out of three girls and four boys) of the great grandparents. I find I talk more about my brothers but they were all closer in age to me than my sisters (one sister is six years older and another sister is eight years younger). Just one brother is outside of that closeness to me as he is ten years younger. My prayers are very much with my older sister who had to have surgery lately and for a speedy recovery for her. 

I do feel a great desire to get back to writing the books Blake and Pincombe these days and a bit impatient to have that begin. But it is a process and will involve my transcribing the latin documents that I have at hand with regard to this Blake family way back in time. I feel I can progress from Robert Blake who left his will in 1521 living at Enham and will begin there initially. If I can take it back further I will but time will tell me that as I work through the material. With regard to the Pincombe book (which is really Pencombe as that was their surname when they arrived at North Molton it does appear) I can begin with John Pencombe who is on the Tax rolls and work my way forward but there to I have information on the Pencombe family of Pencombe Herefordshire which can be added in once I have transcribed the documents at hand. In this case I am working on a family that probably came from the modern Belgium area of the Continent perhaps in the early 1100s as there are records back that far. I  shall have to have a look at the archives there to see if there is anything. But the yDNA line points to a European line and not a Western Hunter Gatherer as is the case with my Blake line. 

But also I want to start scheduling myself to work on the index of the photo albums and to start collecting matches using Edward's present charts and the Excel files that I gave to him as I downloaded his matches from Ancestry. I need to see if any of them are on Gedmatch. Unfortunately collecting from 23 and Me did not happen in his case although he has many many excellent matches there. I may try writing to people to see if I can acquire the matching lengths to help with phasing his grandparents as it might interest people to have that information as well that are his 2nd cousins since they share great grandparents. For the other testing companies I have that material at hand and can search for those matches. It is a long shot for sure but I think it does make me feel happier about breaking up this set of fourty albums that covered all of his life really but they are all scanned. The early pictures I scanned for him maybe six months before he passed away and he found that to be something very pleasant to look at as he organized them in an online type of photo album so thinking about that does make me think he would like what I am doing. He and I belong to the generation that viewed everything in place not online. But this generation that will receive the photo albums  will view it online by preference. But perhaps in the future there will be a child who wants to see those original pictures in their binders; no one can know that. 

Vanilla tea all drank; a gift of my daughter, and now solitaire puzzles and then breakfast and the cleaning. I am a bit late today.  

 

  

 

The value in working on the great grandparents.

 Really all that I will be doing is taking the set of phased grandparent chromosomes and labeling say the Blake portion subdividing it so to speak and showing where the Knight area is and where the Blake area is  - it will not really resemble the chromosome that a great grandparent  actually has. That would require my knowing a lot more about the matches of my cousins than how they match me. But it is interesting to see the area broken down into eight great grandparents. Worked on the 2nd chromosome yesterday and it did go fairly quickly through about the first 1/5th of the matches thus far simply because I have so many known cousin matches. 

The Sermon at Church was very interesting actually. He is a very knowledgeable speaker and quickly comes up with lots of linking comments on the early Christian Church since that is his specialty. I quite enjoyed the United Church Minister's sermons at Dominion Chalmers years ago and in the mid to late 90s until he retired. Edward spotted it in our bulletin at Orleans and we went to Dominion Chalmers just for the series but ended up staying there until that minister retired. He used to talk to Edward just for a few minutes after every service and following the death of his brother and then mother he really wanted that little chat each week.  The new minister was young and into a more folksy less old music service and /Edward asked if I wanted to go regularly to my own Church so we picked the Cathedral with its beautiful organ and wonderful choirs and went there and I still do except online. I do like to give God my 10% as He instructed and so the Sunday was a lovely day as always. God gave it to us as a day of rest and worship. 

Cleaning day today and it is the basement. I shall soon begin with the robot vacuuming the rug. No rush. My hour of exercise is complete and just breakfast to have whilst the robot cleans. 

There will be time to work on Chromosome 2 and that will fit into the day of cleaning the basement as well. Just having a break and working on the matches and on this chromosome I have a known match with a 5th cousin Rawlins but she descends from one of the older Cotterill lines as well along with some other similar matches. What I can not readily determine is the division here between Rawlins and Cottrell in their lines. I think this is the only chromosome where I have that difficulty although will search it out. I am matching because they are Rawlins or because they are Cotterill/Cottrell? That is the question but it isn't that long a match and they do follow each other sequentially so certainly possible but would I get a good match that is the question because it is a number of generations back. It is a problem that I may not be able to solve! The ancestor of these two lines does appear to be a William Cotterel with two sons Stephen and William with Stephen marrying Mary Rawlins 28 Jan 1764 at Enford, Wiltshire a daughter of my 5x great grandparents William Rawlins and Mary Ford. William Cotterell married Elizabeth Kempton 3 May 1760 at Wilsford nr Pewsey, Wiltshire. An interesting conundrum for sure. It doesn't even help me that there is a good X chromosome match for Rawlins since DNA divides as it divides so some of it will be Rawlins/Rawlings and some of it will be Cotterell/Cotterill depending on your descent. I  mull this around since technically I would not inherit Cotterell from these earlier marriages since they are not in my line coming down from William Rawlins and Mary Ford. So am I seeing actual Cotterill in this match where my newer infusion of Cotterill is matching this older Cotterill/Cotterell  or is it simply Rawlings/Rawlins. I am particularly cognizant of the match with my known 5th cousin who does have Cotterell/Cotterill in her lines going back including both of the marriages Mary Rawlins with Stephen Cotterel and later William Rawlins and Mary Cottrell by 1842 (marriage not yet located by me and it may have been in Australia as all their children were born there commencing 22 Jun 1842 so she is looking at her 3x great grandparents in this case so how large a match would I anticipate - 16 cM does seem reasonable but we will see what I garner. I have a number of known matches in this instance in terms of how they descend from this couple William Rawlins and Mary Cottrell in Australia. 

Drinking tea and time to do the solitaire puzzles and I did accomplish that. Time to get some work done. 

 

Chromosome 3 completed

 A whirlwind day and the completion of Chromosome 3 made it a successful day. Plus I realized that I had finally thought through a methodology that would work for the photo albums. I will work with the indexes and create a full index of all the family photos and then create the photo books. The hard copy pictures that are not in the photo albums (7 or 8) will be shredded. That will be thousands of pictures I think. There are so many but remaining is a fully scanned set of pictures by date that fits into the indexes and the original slides prior to the digital cameras. It does sound much easier for me to take on except the eye work will be heavy but I can work away at that in batches not quite so long as working on the photo albums which are more of a physical work job plus mental it would appear. 

So today I begin Chromosome 2 and it has 116 matches with 20 known cousins. These cousins relate to my great grandparent lines with two Rawlings,  four Buller, four Pincombe, two Gray, four Knight and four Blake. I do not have any known Cotterill or Taylor lines. The spread is excellent across the chromosome with just a few breaks where it is unknown. That doesn't mean it will be fast because I will be downloading Relatives in common, Matches shared etc depending on the nomenclature of the various databases. 

I am deciding when I will begin the extraction of Edward's matches from the various databases using the same methodology as I have used. I did collect more information which at the time seemed superfluous but in the long run was a good idea. It will be a large task although I already extracted them into a list for Edward which I can use as a reference point to aid me along the path. 

 Sunday again and it is hard to believe how fast the weeks pass. I have my chicken all ready to make my chicken stew and that sounds delicious. Generally I eat chicken for four days and then fish or eggs for three days. It works well and my expenditure of time on planning meals is very short. My grocery list is ready for the next trip to the store but I want to scrub my refrigerator first this time. I like to clean it in the winter when it is less full. Although I wipe any spills when they happen generally but getting out the shelves and drawers really lets me give it a good cleaning. 

Church later this morning and I do enjoy going to Church very much online. I wonder sometimes if I ever will go back to in house worship and time will tell. We are meant to gather as Christians in our Churches and celebrate the gifts of God. It is  my constant omission for quite a while now (since before COVID for sure). Edward loved the music of the choirs and the organ at my Church although he did prefer his own United Church but certainly the draw of the music and the organ was very strong for him. 

Parliament back in and will watch Question Period next week. It is a time of hard work here in Canada as we work to make ourselves Tariff Proof. It is coming along but lots more to do. We need good jobs for our young people and I am hoping that they leap into creating new companies within Canada to make items like vacuum cleaners and other small appliances that we no longer make here. There are lots of new ideas on how to create and make things and it is the youth that will do that. What they see on their video games they need to now create in real life. They can do it; they are clever and well educated - creative thinking is what is needed to create items that exist digitally but give them that extra creativity to make them better, quieter, more efficient and Canadian. Go Canada Go. 

Drinking my tea and solitaire puzzles are next to wake up the brain.  

Supporting the government

I am always one for supporting the government that won the election; the people do get to choose. I continue to support the methodology of our Prime Minister. I may not always agree with him but as an working economist he has the knowledge and the experience to convert us from an economy dependent on the current trade deal to standing tall and strong on the world stage with many deals including a deal with our friends and neighbours to the south if that is their desire (United States and Mexico). Cutting the GST from 7% to 5% (over time) which was done by past Prime Minister Harper was a very economically unsound move because it funded the government. That was the intention of the GST; the GST was a wealth tax because so many items are excluded that are necessities and so those less fortunate pay considerably less GST over a year (the only people who really benefited were the wealthy). Not long after PM Harper brought in his first government the Stock Market in New York crashed in 2008 and we never recovered within his governance and still we have not yet recovered (as it turned out the era under PM Trudeau was also not productive for Canada although five years of it were COVID influenced) but we are on our way. Balancing the budget by selling off Canadian items to the Americans is not good business practice (the items were making money for Canada - short term money is not worth while in the long run). The budget will balance it will just take time; re-tuning business always take time but we have lots of it for sure. Ontario for the first time with the federal governance of PM Harper was a have not province under his leadership because he only saw oil as an economy for Canada and did not support the industries in Ontario sufficiently. I would rather Pierre Poilievre does not follow his ideas. There are economies all over this country that need to be built up/created in order to make ourselves more self-sufficient. I am a conservative first and foremost but like many I did not support PM Harper in 2015 (that support for the Liberals did not last long as I have always hated the tendency of liberals to toss money at it but I will say this government has been thorough and thoughtful in this process of making us trade independent). I realize that a Stock Market crash such as occurred in 2008 was a cruel twist in an otherwise productive government but one must accept and move forward in a way that benefits all of the country.  We are a hard working productive people (I call that fighting people but I did grow up with four brothers (three of whom were my best friends as a child and the fourth was ten years younger and only ten when I married so that opportunity was missed)) who do well and in our history we built a railroad across a nation having purchased Rupert's Land and became a joined country from ocean to ocean to ocean and then we built the St Lawrence Seaway. All of this on our own - go Canada go. I was pleased to hear Pierre Poilievre say that he would work with the Prime Minister in parliament. Of course he is going to bring up opposing points (we expect no less) but working together is important at this time in our history. That is life. Non support of the government at this time and causing an election will be punished at the polls. 

Chromosome 3 has just under 30 matches left to do and hopefully I will complete that today. Still I could not work on the photo albums. I will have to work hard to get into that I think. It isn't lack of interest but rather it seems like a lot of work for something that is all scanned and filed by time period. The indexes though include everything so again it would be a lot of eye work for me and I can only do so much although my eyes are stronger than a year ago. What I really need to do is to create an electronic file that only contains the family items and then construct the photo albums. It is maybe the better way for me as I contemplate that. It is a massive task really looking at it. One needs to be on a desert island somewhere without internet and just doing that I suspect. In the  meantime I continue to contemplate the process that I will use to phase Edward's grandparents. I know it is a project that was dear to his heart but without any close family (daughter tested) or first cousins tested (he does have a couple of half first cousins though that will be helpful) for autosomal DNA it will be problematic for sure. 

Mostly the matches did all get corrected in terms of grandparent when I went through them for the re-phasing of the grandparents but the occasional item needed to be updated. Separating out Taylor and Cotterill have proven to be the commonest work that I will use the AI to help me with. For the others the matches have been extremely helpful. I still need to check the databases and see if there is anything new that would be interesting. 

Tea all drank and time to do the solitaire puzzles.  

 

  

 

A good working day on Chromosome 3

 This chromosome will take a couple of days more likely because I had to repair a difficulty with it when I re-phased the grandparents DNA. Still a couple of the matches needed a deeper look at them before I could assign them and I am collecting Relatives in common this time as I work my way through. I am about one third of the way working on the F's. 

A lot happening with the Conservative Convention but I have not re-established my membership in the Conservative Party. I generally vote Conservative but I decided long ago that I would not be a member of a political party anymore. 

The meeting with the Prime Minister and the Premiers was most interesting and everyone on the same page these days for the most part. We need to grow Canada for the generations to follow in a way that is sustainable and not influenced by the changes in administration in other countries. Self-sufficient we actually are so long as we do not mind eating stored vegetables all winter once the fresh run out type of thing but our greenhouses are also doing a good job of giving us some fresh vegetable. But I leave all of that up to the leaders; my musing is just thinking out loud to myself. There are much more able people than me running the government. 

I think today will be the day that I get back to working on the photo albums. Perhaps try to do an hour here and an hour there just to get back into it. I did find it to be somewhat disturbing taking apart something created that covered the life of my husband pretty much from the earliest times of his life but mostly from the time that we knew each other until he passed away. He scanned all of the pictures and they are all in files so he probably realized that as time passed the binders would decrease. I just had to accept that and I have. Phasing  his grandparents will be a nice addition to the work that he did on his lines. 

Although I thought I had looked at all of these matches when I rephased the grandparents I rather think that I just passed through some of them since they were not of value to me. This time every file is being carefully examined for extra details to assist in phasing the great grandparents. So I am finding some interesting items that I missed the first time through not that they alter the grandparents; they do not that was why I passed them by but they do have a role to play with the great grandparents. Mostly I have collected 2nd, 3rd and 4th cousins so looking back to 3x great grandparents at the limit but some of these were 5th and 6th cousins and even further on occasion when endogamy influences the matching. These are definitely the matches I want to regard carefully because they will help to separate Buller from Taylor and Rawlings from Cotterill, even Pincombe from Gray (and as I have learned this especially is showing up in this chromosome where the known Pincombe occupies perhaps half of the total but now I can see the Gray (and Routledge) match extending backward through time where I hadn't really noticed it before). Separating Blake and Knight is generally straightforward as I have many many matches but still some are still in the unsure column. 

Today streaks of cloud in the sky and it is minus 21 degrees celsius and another cold day promised. We have been in the deep freeze now into the second week. Generally it last several weeks to a month but it has been a couple of years since we experienced it. All in how the systems move about and right now the polar vortex is being dragged down from the high Arctic into Canada and parts of the United States. But the snowfalls have been excellent and generally when it is so cold not so much snow. So that has been a bonus this cold spell to help fill up the lakes and rivers with good fresh water. 

I think when people trade with us they do see us as a source of fresh water for the future as Climate Change dominates the landscape of the world around us. Climate Change has occurred many times in the past and because records do not exist that far back we do not know if it was because of very very active volcanic eruptions which we are now duplicating with our industrial output or wildfire which cleans out the forest and is needed for some plants to regenerate. So Climate Change is real in archaeological records but the cause of it not known to us other than in our own generation. Looking into the very deep past may help us with our quest to handle Climate Change. 

Collection Day and it is the large collection day which includes garbage. I am putting out one sole white plastic bag which is perhaps one third full in a large green bag. I would like to just put out the white plastic bag but I think it has to be in a green bag for them to take it (I tried it and it was left). Perhaps there will be a change now with so much more being recycled (flexible plastic like bags and freezer containers, etc used to dominate my garbage can but not any more with the new pickup rules). Either that or make smaller green bags perhaps; we will see how that flows. But it has taken me six weeks to collect up one third of a bag so amazing really when you think about it. All the rest is recycling except for the power tool from my old vacuum which I had forgotten to place out until now. That is the end of the old vacuum. The ShopVac is doing a great job whilst I wait for vacuums to be made in Canada once again. Since I am 80 it probably doesn't matter what I do others will do differently I am sure.

Drinking my tea and about to do the solitaire puzzles. Yesterdays most difficult one was a challenge you really had to watch very carefully every single solitary move. It is fun to be challenged with these puzzles first thing getting my brain warmed up for work for the day. One hour of exercise also already done and a snack to tide me over until I eat my breakfast.  

As I have been saying

Canada, in order to fulfill the dreams and aspirations of the Fathers of Confederation, must diversify its trade and make Canada economically sound on its own. That is what I have been saying for a while now quietly to myself on my blog and they said it loudly back in the 1800s. It was good to hear the Prime Minister say the same; we need it and we can have it but it will be hard work. The same hard work that put a railroad across a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans,  5,500 plus kilometres from Cape Spear, Newfoundland to the Pacific in British Columbia. The Trans Canada Highway 7,800 kilometres winds across Canada; we need a four lane highway across the north in the province of Ontario which must get done and sooner rather than later as much of it is only two lines plus a passing lane. This road is twice as busy this past year and the widening is needed and I hope to see shovels in the ground in the spring all across the province. Surely we can accomplish quickly, in Ontario, this tiny bit of road when one compares what our ancestors did over a hundred years ago building a railway from ocean to ocean. 

The auto-workers could become road builders for a time until we have that road done but retraining is more important for sure (we can not live in the past; the future is there for us to grab hold of and run with it). I can think of lots of additions to small engine items with AI coming in and in our present Buy Canadian we would pick them up very quickly. Re-training is what has to happen though; industries come and go and we have to move with the times.  My husband trained for eight years (undergraduate, postgraduate to his PhD) to be a scientist but after a two year stint as a Post doc he went back and did a library degree and got a job. Sometimes one just has to retrain and off you go into a new job. On the other hand we need to bring back the production of washing machines, dryers, refrigerators, stoves, vacuum cleaners and dish washers from the United States - our industries were out competed and closed during free trade and now CUSMA brings these items to us across the border. We could build our own (needed just as much as cars and the same type of  work just smaller) as we did before Free Trade (another good industry (small engine) to create as everyone buys them and the opportunity to improve what we are buying now is huge thus making it interesting).  I am wondering if this Chinese EV catches on if the auto industry building Chinese EVs for Canadians will end up in British Columbia since that is much closer to China. 49,000 cars is really just a drop in the bucket. A small city of 70,000 buying one or two per household (or more) would swallow up all those cars in just one buying spree. I think it is exciting to have this opportunity especially for our youth to have a less expensive car that is also electric (there will still be room for Stellantis to do so as they mentioned they still plan to do EVs here). Plus the tariff easement on canola and other items is great that was gained. Being Tariff proof is very important. Then again a home grown auto industry can also be there; just takes money. 

We share a huge border with our friend and neighbour the United States and will always be friends but we need to be Tariff Proof and that forces us to concentrate on growing Canadian industry by increasing our home production back to the sort of levels and types before Free Trade - our youth needs jobs. 

Writing back and forth with my many cousins these days in the United States looking at our mutual matches. Worked away at the matches and just three left to do. They went very smoothly into the great grandparents lines for the most part. Chromosome 6 was a gem for sure. 

I will start Chromosome 5 today and there are 94 matches with nine known cousins covering three of the grandparent lines. Pincombe is particularly well covered for this chromosome and all are descendant of the Pincombe line none are descendant of the Gray line. The known Blake are all from the Knight line. The known Buller are all from the Buller line. This chromosome could be a challenge as it does not have any known from five of the eight great grandparents (Blake, Rawlings, Cotterill, Gray, Taylor). A quick glance though does tell me I may have been a bit remiss in collecting up the Known so will perhaps have a look at that before I begin. 

Tea drank and must do my solitaire puzzles and then begin on my research.  

Continuing with research

 Although I have not made any conclusions the review of the Rawlings/Cotterill matches on Chromosome 7 were certainly very interesting and that one section of my 7th chromosome is Rawlings is quite indisputable and the other section simply needs more research but does appear to be Cotterill. Since I do not inherit any Cotterill because my lines do not directly intersect with the cousins that I do match and we share 5x great grandparents in William Rawlins and Mary Ford, it would appear that I have acquired Cotterill in that particular chromosome but more work is needed on the trees of the matches that are within that grouping. Chromosome 7 is now complete and I am working on Chromosome 6 where there are 128 matches so a longer research period to complete that chromosome. However, I do have fourteen cousins to assist me in that task and at least one from every grandparent line. On this chromosome all five siblings are quite different from each other which perhaps lends to the large number of matches available (I do not collect all matches although did tend to collect anything over 19 cM in the past. Mostly now I only collect 25 cM or greater (single length). 

I think given a population of 40 million, 49,000 EVs coming into the country is a fairly small number It is a less expensive car meaning our young people can afford to purchase it and they will be a much more mobile part of our population over the next few years as they work on improving their skill sets and finding jobs that help them along that path. Each family could afford two of them to make life easier and more flexible especially if they have children. Times will be somewhat more difficult as we move forward in diversifying our trade base. Plus we have all sorts of new industrial aims to follow through on and complete over the next twenty years. It will be exciting I think for Canada and for our young people.  I would say to Premier Ford that he has not done anything to improve our situation in the last year and wasting money on frivolous unnecessary items like removing the webcams which were capturing speeders particularly in school zones was a mistake and a waste of money. We need the Trans Canada Highway across Northern Ontario widened to four lanes and as soon as possible - the traffic on that road is too heavy; Toronto doesn't need an underpass - the north needs that road. Clinging to the past does not work; we must forge ahead into this future that the Prime Minister has painted. One recalls I did not vote Liberal being Conservative in most of my voting years but I do tire of waste of money very quickly and there has been too much of it in Ontario lately. 

Another heavy snowfall cleared away and we have a good base now for skiing. I am taking a rest for the moment but hopefully still snow here in March when I will take up skiing once again. It is pretty cold out there for this old person! I can enjoy the snow from the inside of the house. Trees all coated with white and looking quite ethereal. God is in the Heavens watching and waiting for us to do the right thing. Love they neighbour as thyself and we will be following God's law and much better for it. Cloudy out there and some snow is promised. January can sometimes be so cold with a bright sun and blue sky but today it is cold and cloudy. 

Drinking tea and solitaire puzzles to work on before I start into the matches for Chromosome 6. The first two done yesterday were interesting.  The first one is Blake with our 2x great grandparents John Blake and Ann (Farmer) Blake in common. The second the same so a good beginning with two matches already separated into great grandparents. 

 

A good research day

 Chromosome 7 has good long lengths of Rawlings/Cotterill and quite a few matches over the entire length of Rawlings/Cotterill in total putting them all together. What does it all mean? Since I do not descend from the marriage of Mary Rawlins to Stephen Cotterell 28 Jan 1764 at Enford, Wiltshire nor do I descend from the marriage of Mary Cottrell (grand daughter of Mary and Stephen) to William Rawlins. Mary Rawlins is my 4th great grandaunt and her grand daughter Mary Cottrell is my 2nd cousin 4x removed. We all share my 5x great grandparents William Rawlins and Mary Ford who married 30 Sep 1741 at Wylye, Wiltshire. I do have Cotterill and Cotterill descendants who match me so one is left to assume the match that I share with them is Rawlings but there are lengths that do not have Rawlings matches as far as I can tell. But this length of chromosome that I have on Chromosome 7 which extends almost the entire length of the chromosome (just 3 cM at the end is Blake/Knight) has proven to be most interesting. It just happens that this particular chromosome is very heavy on the Rawlings grandparent side for me and overall I inherited more than the 25% Rawlings when one looks at inheriting from grandparents with 50% coming from each parent so 25% possibly from each grandparent but my Rawlings is more than 32%. 

Looking at Chromosome 7 with just ten matches left to do all of the total length of the chromosome I inherited is covered by matches with the exception of 35 cM to 70 cM with the total length of the chromosome from 0 to 156 cM where I have a crossover that takes me to Blake for the last 3 cM. Two of the individuals are known to me that match on this chromosome and both are 3rd c 1xr living in England actually where most of my Rawlings family live other than Australia, Canada and a few in the United States. These two known cousins occupy from 106 cM to 156 cM. They have not inherited any Cotterill from the earlier generations but are related to descendants as I am including four of the matches and in this small chart I am just looking at 19 matches in total (the two known cousins may match some of the others but it does not show up in my charting). I am able though to say that from 77 cM to 156 cM is Rawlings and that includes 12 of the 19 matches. By luck and chance one of the matches has a derivative of the surname Cotterill/Cotterell which doesn't prove anything but is interesting but the other great part is that this match has a second match with me and runs from 28 cM to 34 cM. Of the remaining seven matches five of them are matching in this length between 28 cM to 34 cM. Just two matches (siblings) are outside of this particular grouping. At this point I am not concluding that the group from 0 to 27 cM is Cotterill without Rawlings because I have not recorded small lengths of matching (the group from 0 to 35 may well be both Rawlings and Cotterill in their ancestry). Tracing down the two siblings is probably a good plan so will think about that but it is the first time that I have had sufficient matches (and it caught my interest as I have not been thinking very deeply about it as I have made this trek through the chromosomes designing a database to produce a phased set of great grandparents). Rather I thought to leave that to the completed database to extract for me using AI. What we know about twelve of the matches is that they have Rawlings and do likely belong to the descendants of William Rawlings and Mary Ford because they resemble my two cousins who do not have a possible Cotterill line in their ancestry charting them back but would match any Rawlins/Rawlings that is shared. The group of five share their length with an individual with a derivative of the Cotterill/Cotterell name and as I check their trees I may also find Rawlins which is a future endeavour but they do not appear to match my two cousins known to me. The remaining two match three siblings on the Rawlings chromosome. Indeed four out of five siblings have various lengths of Rawlings matching the above matches here and there. 

So the task today is to complete the last ten matches and I shall set myself to do that 

Must do my solitaire puzzles but first a cup of tea to make. I already had my breakfast as it is Collection day and I was out early putting out the blue bins and the green bin. Life has changed and it is changing rapidly for Canada as we work hard to make ourselves Tariff Proof and we have no idea what is happening with USMCA/MUSCA/CUSMA which comes up for review later this year. But necessity is always the mother of invention and we are on that path as quickly as possible to protect jobs and increase industry. We must be careful  not to waste money on items that are, at the moment, unimportant to the aim of making ourselves Tariff Proof.  There does need to be a push towards manufacturing in Ontario particularly of small motor appliances like dishwashers, washing machines, dryers and the list is endless. Time for great improvements in these devices and an opportunity to start up businesses lost to competition during the NAFTA/CUSMA days. I have to say that my ShopVac does a great job as a vacuum but the noise is incredible; I would like to buy a new vacuum one of these days and there are a lot of opportunities for small businesses to be created particularly in Ontario where so many jobs have been lost because we are not Tariff Proof. I would say overall Auto Pact/NAFTA/CUSMA gave a good life to North Americans over the past sixty years but decisions have been made that make this cross-border trading difficult because we are not Tariff Proof. The Americans are our best friends and neighbours (one cannot share a border the length of ours and not be good friends and neighbours) and will continue to be but until we are tariff proof we must continue to support Canadian businesses that are not Tariff Proof. It is cold in Canada and many Canadians still go south but a large group (no doubt shivering most days) have elected to stay here and help us to become Tariff Proof. But the days will come when the traffic again increases going south especially during the long cold winters in Canada. In the meantime Tariff Proof is what we are heading towards. 

  

Heavy snowfall

 We are having a heavy snowfall but only 10 cm predicted but at the moment it is fairly thick coming down although not so much that the distance vision is limited. Just a lovely white snowfall on this beautiful world that the Creator produced and gave to us at a later time to protect and cherish.

Yesterday finished the cleaning and worked on the matches for chromosome 7. This one is very interesting as there is a length that is inherited by pretty much all of my close cousins that I have found testing all the way back to John Pincombe and Mary Charly who married at Bishops Nympton, Devon  8 Nov 1767. Their six children with their descendants are the progenitors of many of the Pincombe families in the Bishops Nympton area. Although John had a brother William (both sons of John Pincombe and Grace Manning who married 20 Mar 1725 at Bishops Nympton) William's only child, a son, William died at the age of 21 (his parents William Pincombe married Grace Smyth 13 Jun 1758 at North Molton). John and William also had a sister Grace who married John Butcher 31 Mar 1755 at Bishops Nympton But I have yet to trace their two surviving daughters beyond their baptism (another daughter and only son died as infants/young children). John (married to Grace Manning) was the only son of William Pincombe and Mary Vicary who married 17 Jun 1685 at Bishops Nympton. The only other sibling was Joan who was buried in 1726 at Bishops Nympton. This William traces back to John Pincombe and Johane Blackmoore who married 25 Sep 1655 at Bishops Nympton and of their other five children Thomas married Christian (unknown) and their single surviving child John Pincombe married Catharine Bryer at Bishops Nympton 3 Nov 1732 and their five children are the other Pincombe grouping in the Bishops Nympton area and are the progenitors of many of the Pincombe families also in the Bishops Nympton area. Another son of John Pincombe and Johane Blackmoore, Hugh married Sarah (unknown) likely at Swimbridge, Devon and the Pincombe families found in the Landkey, Devon area are their descendants. Working through this Chromosome 7 I may spot some of the descendants of these lines in the Living DNA matches or others that I have not noted before. 

There does look to be a potential for a lot of snow if it keeps up at the present rate. Although I have had fun skiing I am pretty tired from all that fun and will be putting the skis away for the rest of the month or two. It is not something that I generally would go out on my own and do at 80 years of age. Although I could go around the backyard but I have not done a lot of research these past couple of weeks and need to get back to that. Plus I really do enjoy my research just as I enjoy skiing and there is a time and place for everything especially at this age for sure.  

Continuing with Chromosome 7 today and I am about one quarter of the way through the matches. Thus far I have separated out Rawlings, Blake, Knight, Cotterill (coming down from my 4x great grandparents), and Pincombe. Half of my great grandparents in the first quarter of matches is  not too bad. I am not likely to locate Taylor from the Buller/Taylor grandparents and perhaps not Cotterill from the possible father of my paternal grandmother but likely Gray is a possibility. 

Drinking tea and must move to the solitaire puzzles and then begin my extractions of data.  

The third cleaning day

 Yesterday some accomplishment on Chromosome 7 but a surprise well perhaps not really as I had anticipated that I would see Cotterill matches back to my 5x great grandparents William Rawlins and Mary Ford who married 30 Sep 1741 at Wylye, Wiltshire and their daughter Mary Rawlins married to Stephen Cotterel 28 Jan 1764 at Enford, Wiltshire. The size of the match is surprising but the grand daughter of Mary Rawlins and Stephen Cotterel namely Mary Cottrell married William Rawlins her second cousin and this was a marriage in Australia possibly as both of their families had emigrated to Australia by 1842 when their first child was born 22 Jun 1842 at Welling near The Reed Beds, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia. That does help me as I work to prove or disprove the suggestion by testing companies that George Cotterill was the father of my paternal grandmother although the priest, on her baptismal registration has entered the name Cotteril as one of her middle names (Ada Bessie Cotteril Rawlings) and her birth registration carries the same name. So very interesting and the match is surprisingly large considering the path back (in total one sibling matches at 31.1 cM in one length, a second sibling (myself) matching on three chromosomes with 7.8, 31.1 and 10.8 cM being the lengths, a third sibling matches at 36.5 cM). Since this is a large match on Chromosome 7 it does rather give me an ability to separate out the results of the known relationship with the Cotterell/Cotterill family with the unknown. Although I did note the match on the other two chromosomes where I match I did not comment at that time because I couldn't really be confident with such small matches. I will make note of the matches in common at this time as that will also be helpful in my quest. 

 We may get some rain today it appears and it looks icy out there so lucky we bought more anti-slip stuff to fix the laneway, porch and patio. Must get out there and do that a little later. I have my cleats on my boots all ready for that endeavour. 

Other than that carrying on with my research and the cleaning on the three days as I enjoy the quiet winter as I hibernate away from all the world in my little house although I do need to look into moving closer to family and I rather think I will start to work on that very soon actually. 

Tea drank and must do my solitaire puzzles and move on to the cleaning.  

  

Chromosome 10 completed and Chromosome 9 started

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.  

2026 and half way through the 2020s

 Happy New Year was the refrain yesterday everywhere it appeared. God gave us this beautiful world and ours here in Canada is deep in snow and it is minus 17 degrees celsius today but the World's longest skating rink is open here in Ottawa. It will be busy today I am sure in spite of the wind chill which is minus 29 degrees celsius. One of the great entertainments in Ottawa is that skating rink and on the weekends it is particularly busy. 

I worked on Chromosome 11 yesterday and it will have a few challenges but may yield interesting results for Taylor and Cotterill as there are long lengths of chromosome without a known cousin and a number of the matches are from Ancestry. We also went grocery shopping so already for New Years today. New Year's Eve we generally make a Fish Soup/Stew that consists generally of four kinds of fish cut into nice chunks then cooked quickly at a high temperature in olive oil with garlic for one minute. Then add vegetable broth, some water and spices along with diced tomatoes and cook for 30 minutes and once at the boil add fresh parsley then simmer for the remaining time. Prepare croutons with olive oil in the oven sufficient to line the soup bowl and then a big scoop of the fish soup/stew and it is lovely along with a cheese tray/crackers and fruit tray. Lovely dinner for New Years Eve and generally we do the same each year or something very similar. 

Today I will continue on Chromosome 11 and there are  76 matches in total and I  have completed 19. With 18 known cousins from each of the four grandparent lines I am finding that the work is flowing quickly again for this chromosome. It is more time that flies by much too quickly. 

 As the new year dawns and I can see that in the east this morning, God is watching in the Heavens wondering when mankind will find a way to live by His rules - love your neighbour as yourself. Greed ranks high as one of the great sins of the Christian Church and most incursions into other people's property is for greed - to steal from people. It is sad really that even now in 2026 we can not find peace in our world. 

Tea is ready and I shall work on my solitaire puzzles to start the day having completed my entire set of exercises which takes about 50 minutes in total. It is a good set of exercises which results in about 1500 steps (between exercises) and is 28 Zone Minutes with a cardio load of 13 on my new Fitbit which is lower than the Charge 5 which tended to record it around 45 so we will see how that transpires over the next few months as I suspect there is a learning curve in a new FitBit. This one is a Charge 6. Calories burned listed as 321 calories which is about right from the earlier FitBit result.  

Cleaning Day Three and then on to Research Days

 Yesterday Cleaning Day Two accomplished along with completing Chromosome 12. Staying inside means more time for research although it has been lovely skiing this year. Once we get sufficient snow  the skiing will be back. In the meantime the cold weather saps the water out of all of that ice. 

Chromosome 12 with twenty known matches went very smoothly and just some work on the Buller/Taylor and Rawlings/Cotterill matches to be done. I may resolve both of these unknown lines - Ellen (Taylor) Buller my maternal grandmother's mother and unknown Cotterill (although several testing companies have selected an individual) my paternal grandmother's father. It does add a sense of mystery to these two lines for sure. Although I was hesitant to work on my paternal grandmother's father's line that is passing in my mind although I will always remember that she loved her step-father very much. She lived with her maternal grandparents when she was quite young (from birth until five years of age) until her mother married William Taylor 11 Feb 1882 in Ludgershall, Wiltshire (a short distance from Kimpton, Hampshire where she was born and baptized). She is found on the census of 1881 with her grandparents William Rawlins and Elizabeth (Lywood) Rawlins at Collingbourne Dulcis, Wiltshire. 

 I did start Chromosome 11 and there are seventeen known cousins for this chromosome with Blake/Knight and Pincombe being particularly well represented but there are matches for all four of the grandparent lines. Buller has just one and this cousin shares X DNA inherited from Sarah (Cheatle) Welsh's mother (still not entirely sure of her surname but she was married to William Cheatle father of Sarah). This was the first chromosome that I ever phased more than a decade ago now. At the time I was amazed at what one could do with all of those matches acquired at that time. Now with  1500 matches over four grandparents the process is a lot less complicated. The methodology has evolved as well although I tend to use several different sets of data to work on crossover points including the original GedMatch setup that was commonly used back a decade ago. I find that the testing companies using different chips does give a slight variance on these crossover points and one must select the best point bearing in mind that this is not yet the exact science it will be one day. 

Having five sibling results makes a large difference but I am about to begin working on my husband's crossover points using just his results, his daughters results and many many 2nd, 3rd and 4th cousins. I suspect it will be possible but will write it up as I proceed. It will be a slower process as I need to get back to writing the books as well. Once I have completed the great grandparents then a portion of each day will go to writing of either the Blake or the Pincombe books. I have given myself until 2028 to complete these two books and will then move to Buller  and a fourth one not yet selected. 

I will never write up Edward's family as I am not familiar enough with his lines - in terms of DNA lots of familiarity and I will do that but I do not know any family stories so will leave that to whomever one day picks up his work where he left off.  He was happy with his final version of his tree although was sad not to have discovered Isaac Kipp's parents names. There were possibilities but he did not feel there was adequate proof for any of them at this time. That his yDNA leads back to Hendrick Hendricksen Kip was adequate for him as the years passed although he was in touch with several researchers in The Netherlands and a trip was planned but COVID-19 break definitely discontinued that possibility. The work on the autosomal DNA was his although I did collect the data into excel files as I did my own but now I will pick up the traces of that work that he did and move it forward with this attempt to phase his grandparent's DNA and then perhaps take it to great grandparents. He has many many more matches than I do although with Living DNA growing that could change in the future - hard to say. 

Still not much work done on the photo albums; perhaps in the New Year I will try again to work on that.  

Time to get back to my morning exercises. I always do them with a short break. Then tea time and solitaire puzzles.  

 

Ice Storm apears to have moved on

Yesterday we cleared away the ice that coated the laneway and that was a back breaking task for sure but all accomplished for the most part. Hoping for snow the next couple of days and back to skiing once again. First thing in the morning the trees did have a small coating of ice but it was gone by mid afternoon and a sigh of relief I am sure that the vicious ice storm had passed us by for once. 

We did review our freezer content and used up a number of items for last nights dinner which was an interesting one - a four cheese pizza which was very tasty and then two meat dishes - scallops with couscous, peas, grated carrot and tomatoes along with a piece of salmon poached and then placed in a tasty sauce with a cucumber salad on the side. We had our cooler ready with frozen blocks just in case. 

The basement cleaning was completed in the morning and today is the main floor and that will be in an hour or so that I will work on that. 

I also worked on the matches and I am about half way through Chromosome 12. There are  22 known cousins with matches on Chromosome 12 and half way through I now have matches that take me back to great grandparents Pincombe, Knight, Buller, Rawlings, Gray, and Blake. There are a number of matches that are Rawlings/Cotterill and Buller/Taylor and will have to look at the trees to investigate them. I still have about 40 matches left to do for Chromosome 12. There are very few areas that do not have a known great grandparent. Perhaps I will complete the other fourty matches today - hard to predict as I sometimes do follow through and look at trees although the intent is simply to make a list but one can distracted. 

Still 11 chromosomes to do and the number of matches for some of them is very large but almost half way through so that is good. 

Minus 14 degrees celsius today and we are back into the Polar Vortex for a bit as the temperatures will be similar to that for a few days but it is January coming and the coldest months tend to be January and February. 

Tea drank and must do my solitaire puzzles. Breakfast and cleaning next.