The Power of Prayer

One of the advantages of my time here in rehab is that I have more time to myself instead of being involved in the homeschooling of my grandsons. So I’ve been using that time to spend time in prayer. I’m not doing anything different except for the amount of time. For several years I’ve had a routine for organizing my prayers that I’d like to share.

I have several lists on my smartphone to organize the names of people whom I pray for. Here they are – not in any priority order:

 

Shepherding Group

Although I transitioned from being an active elder at church to elder emeritus status last year (after 40 years), one thing that I retained was my shepherding group of 20 families. I not only regularly pray for them, but I try to touch base with them at church each week. I also periodically reach out to them via email asking if there are any specific things that I can pray for.

Praying Around the World

There are a number of missionaries from our church scattered around the world. I also have friends in a number of countries whom I have made over the years. I’ve organized them by geography, and I pray for one area of the world each day. So Monday is Europe, Tuesday is Africa, then South Asia, Southeast/East Asia, Caribbean and South America. There are 2-3 families in each of these. But concentrating on one geography each day means that I can pray specifically for each family regularly.

Long-term Prayers

I keep a list of 6-10 individuals who have long-term issues – things like physical situations or family situations. By putting them on this list I’m trying to not forget them. There is a human tendency to pray when we first hear about something but then forget about it after a while and this list keeps these individuals in front of me. Some of the people on this list I’ve had for 4-5 years.

Church Prayer Chain

Our church sends out a prayer chain twice a week. Some of these prayer requests are for people in the congregation and others are for family members that they are concerned about, i.e., please pray for xxxx’s sister-in-law. I generally only like to pray for people I know so I can put a face to each prayer, so rather than pray for these latter types, I pray for the church member to know how to work with their relative.

Family

Last, but certainly not least, I pray for my family – wife, children, grandchildren, siblings, nieces and nephews, etc. I don’t have these in a list as that’s not needed. But we can’t forget to pray for those who are closest to us.

 

There are many people who pray for things that do not fall into the above categories. For example, I’ve heard prayers like “Pray for our country, our president, our elected officials,” or “Pray for such-and-such organization.” If someone is leading a prayer like this, then I will certainly participate, but I do not put these on any of my lists. I want to be able to visualize the face of the person I’m praying for and to make my prayers personal. There are others who have other practices and I’m fine with that, but this is my focus.

There are a lot of benefits to prayer and there is power in prayer. Even if God has other ideas and we do not understand the eventual outcome, prayer helps to align us with God. And looking to Him is always a good thing!

 

Getting an Amputation

The beginning of 2024 did not go as planned. Below is a synopsis of the last few weeks.

 

Background

I’ve shared before about the problems that I’ve been having with my right foot – how some arthritis at the base of my big tie caused a deformity that put all my walking pressure on that spot, how the callous there broke off leaving a big hole, how I’ve been dealing with trying to get it closed up for five years, a couple of bouts of sepsis, etc.

Just before Christmas our son-in-law got COVID, in fact his entire workplace was shut down for a week. Before he knew he had it, he shared it with our entire family. The symptoms weren’t too bad, but apparently, the extra level of infection was enough that it exacerbated the infection I was already dealing with in my foot (I had just finished a regimen of antibiotic). Thus, after not feeling 100% for the week between Christmas and New Year, I started feeling even lousier. My wife and I made the decision to have me taken to the ER on the day after New Year’s. There I was diagnosed with COVID, given an at-home monitoring kit, and sent home the following morning with instructions to come back if things didn’t get better. They didn’t!

 

Round One – Goodbye Big Toe

The next few days were a bit of a blur. All kinds of blood tests, etc. They did not have a bed available in the main hospital, so initially I had a room at the end of the ER in a “flex” unit. The following day I got moved upstairs. While there I continued to get various blood tests (ever feel like a pincushion?), x-rays, a CT scan, etc. My white blood cell count was really high, my urine was the color of dark tea (indicating the issues my kidneys were having trying to clear the infection from my blood), etc. I was feeling bad enough that they had to abort my first CT scan.

By Saturday, 1/6, they had made the decision that I needed to have my big toe, and the metatarsal behind it, removed. They normally do foot surgery on Tuesdays and Fridays, so rather than the chief foot surgeon, another doctor from that office did the surgery. The doctor indicated that it would be a multi-part surgery – one that I mentally classified as “cut it off”, “clean it up”, close it up. That mental classification turned out to be mostly accurate, but the second part I underestimated.

I did take a picture of the results of that first surgery – but not one that I’m sharing as it’s too gross. At the time I was glad to finally be rid of the source of all my difficulties. They wrapped it up and I was confined to bed for a few days. Was feeling better at that point, but still getting lots of blood draws and there was still concern about my white blood cell counts, etc.

 

Round Two – What’s a TMA?

On Friday, 1/12, I went down for my second surgery. In the meantime, I had an MRI of my foot so they could complete their evaluation. Apparently the level of infection had spread through the rest of the bones in the forefront of my foot, so the decision was made not to just “clean it up”, but to do a full TMA (Transmetatarsal Amputation). This is essentially the removal of the entire front half of my right foot – all five toes, and cutting through the set of metatarsal bones behind them.

[TMA Picture]

 

Just a bit more than a “clean it up”!

The good news is that all the infection was now gone. The ulcer that I had on the bottom of my foot for the last three years is also gone. But there are also downsides to this operation.

 

Round Three – Close it up

After the second surgery, my foot and lower right leg were in a soft cast. I was under strict instruction of NWB (No Weight Bearing) for that foot. So, naturally, I remained confined to bed – a position that ultimately I would be in for two solid weeks.

[Soft Wrap]

 

On Tuesday, 1/19, I had a final surgery to close up the wound. As part of that surgery, they also did an Achilles tendon extension – making some carefully placed cuts of the tendon that will make the tendon longer as it heals and give me some additional flexibility in the ankle.

One of the interesting issues with surgery is that you can’t have any food/drink after midnight on the day of the surgery. That was not an issue with the second surgery as it was at 7am, but the third was in mid-afternoon so I had no nourishment from 7pm the day before until 7pm that night – a long time between meals. And as the meals in the hospital were all low-carb (i.e. no more than 40 carbs), my stomach was perpetually growling.

The day after the surgery I saw the surgeon in my room. Besides the NWB order, there were strict instructions to leave the soft cast in place and to have a follow up visit with him in a few weeks, i.e. the first part of February.

 

Round Four – Rehab

It took a few days to make the arrangements to get moved to a rehab facility. My first choice was at Fellowship Community – a place connected with our denomination and where some of the senior citizens from our church reside. But they didn’t have any short-term rehab rooms available so my second choice was Complete Care, a place that relatively close to where we live and where my wife would be easily able to drive to it. It’s an older facility and a bit shabby, but the staff are very caring and the food is excellent.

[Rehab menu]

 

I’m in a semi-private room and have a roommate, but he’s not terribly communicative. He’s 91, really doesn’t want to be here (he normally is in an assisted living home perhaps 50 miles away). He won’t eat the food – just wants a jelly sandwich on white bread, orange juice, and oatmeal made with milk (not water) and with honey drizzled on the top. He’s quite hard of hearing and often seems to be deliberately ignoring the staff questions to him. So we’re co-existing.

 

Next Step – Discharge and Going Home

This morning I met with the head of physical therapy for evaluation. Tentative plan is for two weeks here then discharge to home. In the meantime I have to build up my strength (especially my arms and left leg as I can’t use my right one), learn what assistive technology will work best (thinking at this point is probably a knee scooter for around home, then transition to a wheelchair at church). Longer term, I’ll need to have some sort of adaptive foot prosthesis so I can wear my shoes and get back to driving. But I’ve got a couple of months before I get to that stage as I need my foot to completely heal.

[Healed TMA]

 

This has been an interesting experience. This two+ weeks in the hospital probably doubles the total hospitalization I’ve had in my life. Even my heart attack was only four days. And then two more weeks in a rehab/skilled nursing facility means an entire month away from home – and away from the rest of my family. I’m anxious to get back to see them, but in the meantime I’ll be patient.

Whatever happens, I continue to rely on knowing that God is in control and he knows the outcome. Go God!

 

The Pierpont Family Name

I recently ran across the below article from a newspaper in 1921 (2 years before the founding of the Pierpont Family Association).

[Newspaper article]

 

This is evidently from a series of newspaper articles that traced family names. Let’s look at it closely, as there are a number of errors which we now know based on more recent historical research.

1)     “…the name is said to have been derived in England from Normandy.”

I’m not sure why the author makes this statement. What does derived in England mean? Is she referring to the fact that in Normandy it was “de Pierrepont” and in England they dropped the “de” part?

2)     “The founder was Robert de Pierrepont, a Norman knight…”

While Robert was the first of the family to come to England (with William the Conqueror), he was not the “founder” of the family. We now know that there were at least a couple of generations before him in Normandy.

3)     “Others say that the Pierreponts were not Norman at all, but that they came from Picardy at the time of the Conquest, having taken the name from a castle in Picardy.”

I’ve discussed the topic of the origin of the family name at length before (https://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2022/01/origin-of-pierrepont-family.html), so I’ll not repeat it here. Please read this research if you are interested.

4)     “…the younger son of William Pierrepont, a younger brother of Sir Robert Pierrepont who was baron Pierrepont and Viscount Newark…”

I’ve also discussed this topic and charted it out before (https://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2019/06/lost-dukedom-of-new-england-pierponts.html). William was not a younger brother of Sir Robert, rather he was a younger brother of Sir Henry, and an uncle of Sir Robert. This also means that the statement in the following sentence about John Pierrepont of Roxbury being a second cousin to Evelyn (duke) is inaccurate as he would be the second cousin, once removed.

5)     “The early members of the family in the new world usually spelled the name Pierepont, but almost all have gone back to the older English speeling, Pierrepont.”

There are three errors in the sentence. The first two are inaccuracies in the printing process as it’s obvious that “Pierepont” should be “Pierpont” and “speeling” should be “spelling.” The person who did the typesetting had a problem with using the “e” key. The third problem requires a bit more explanation.

The statement about “almost all” now using the English spelling of “Pierrepont” is based on where the author of the article lived. She had been born on Long Island in 1887 and, at the time of this writing, was living in northern New Jersey. As a result, the branch of the family she would have been most acquainted with would have been the descendants of Hezekiah Beers Pierrepont (1768-1838). (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezekiah_Pierrepont). Hezekiah was the great-grandson of the Rev James Pierpont of New Haven. He had been born in New Haven, but in 1790 moved to New York City and a decade later moved to Brooklyn, NY. It was there that he not only became quite rich by marrying into a family that owned considerable land (500,000 acres) in NY, but changed his name back to the English spelling – perhaps as a way of sounding most closely related to his distant titled cousins back in England. As the most prominent member of the greater Pierpont family at the time, that apparently was the basis for the author making this statement.

 

This has been a great exercise in pulling together my past research and being able to set the record straight on a newspaper article from over 100 years ago!

Christmas in Pakistan

As I write this it is the day before Christmas. Here in the US we’ve been seeing houses decorated with colored lights, special church services, people getting together with family and friends, and presents being wrapped then unwrapped. Even for those who are not Christians, it’s a time of celebration.

But what does it mean to be a Christian and celebrate Christmas in other places in the world? How about some place like Pakistan where Christians are in the minority?

 

August 19, 2023

It didn’t make the headlines here in the US, but back in August there were riots in the city of Jaranwala, a small city of 120,000 in NE Pakistan. This city is located about 20 miles from Faisalabad (3.2 million people) and 70 miles from Lahore (11.2 million people). [For local readers of my blog, think of Jaranwala being Allentown, Faisalabad being Philadelphia, and Lahore being New York City.] During the course of these riots some 20 churches and nearly 80 homes (of Christian families) were burned by the mobs.

The cause of the riots, which seemed to happen somewhat spontaneously, were ostensibly as a result of a report of a Christian man desecrating a few pages of the Quran. A report in Aljazeera just a few days later gives some of the particulars.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/23/pakistan-christians-in-fear-after-blasphemy-allegations-trigger-violence

Two weeks after this report, there was an article in the Diplomat which explored the incident as apparently stemming from a personal dispute between two individuals.

https://thediplomat.com/2023/09/jaranwala-church-attacks-another-example-of-the-misuse-of-blasphemy-laws-in-pakistan/

As a follow-up, BBC published an article just yesterday with the title “Months after attacks, Pakistan’s Christians still feel unsafe.”

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-67781469

I’ve been following this story closely because I have a friend who lives in the Christian community in Lahore. Here are some pictures that she sent me back in August when these riots had just occurred.

[Fires] [Burned building] [Burned wall]

 

So, what should our response be in cases like this? Before I answer this, let me introduce you to my friend, Samreen.

 

Samreen

I became acquainted with Samreen somewhat by accident back in May 2023. I had identified a scammer who was trying to become friends with me and as I checked out their account in Facebook, I noticed that they had also sent a friend request to someone else - Samreen. I sent a message to Samreen letting her know that her new “friend” was a scam and suggesting that she block that person.

She thanked me for watching out for her, then asked if she could friend me instead. After checking her out, I quickly determined that she was a real person and agreed to accept her friend request. This began our friendship.

Samreen was orphaned when she was quite young. She has no memories of her parents or grandparents, and she had no siblings. But she was fortunate enough to have been raised in a Christian orphanage in Lahore, Pakistan. When she was a young teen, she began helping to teach the younger students in the orphanage. This led to her founding her own ministry to widows and orphans in the Christian colony in Lahore, a ministry that has continued to this day (she’s now in her mid-30s).

Her ministry is called “Faith Fellowship Ministries” (FFM). Here is a link to their website.

https://faithfellowshipminis.wixsite.com/mysite-3

While there are pictures on the website, here are few that give some good insight into this ministry:

[Children] {Rice] [Church]

 

When the riot of August 19 happened, it of course was upsetting to her and all the other Pakistani Christian. There were some radical individuals in Lahore who also joined in the actions against the Christians there. While not as bad as those in Jaranwala, all the Christians in the province were fearful for their lives.

 

What Can You Do?

While it’s difficult to appreciate the atmosphere in places like Pakistan where the Christian population is a small minority surrounded by individuals who may be hostile to Christianity, there are three things I can think of that we can do.

1 – Educate yourself on what’s going on in the world. Don’t just follow news sources from US media. Periodically look at outlets like BBC, Aljazeera, and other international sources. Here is a quote from one of the above references that might give you a perspective.

“Our colony was a model of peace and unity. But this one incident has sent us back centuries. I don’t feel any safety or security here any more.”

 

2 – Realize that there are people around the world who need our prayers. Samreen told me recently:

“Please pray for me. I will be praying for you too, Alan.”

I have put together a list on my phone that has various people/families around the world divided up into regions. So each week I “pray around the world.”

 

3 – Realize that we sometimes need to move from just prayers to actions. Here are few more quotes from Samreen:

“We have people who don’t even have their own Bibles”

“Here people just say we are praying but we need action than words too”

While there are some overseas ministries that have a US affiliate who collects money for them (and gives them tax credit), there are many others like FFM that have no such connections. When the incident in Jaranwala happened, they set up a GoFundMe to try and collect money for the affected families. Having a personal contact with Samreen, I made a small donation. Checking a month later, I was upset to see that I was the only person who made such a donation. That’s sad!

Christmas 2023

As one gets older the time seems to fly by even quicker. It seems like 2023 just started a short time ago and here it is, time to write our annual Christmas letter already. I’m using last year’s letter as a reminder of all the topics I covered then – but also as a way to remind myself what things have happened in 2023 and what things from 2022 might make their way into my mind.

 

Family

Our grandchildren seem to be growing up so quickly! This fall our oldest, Aryon, went off to college – following in his parent’s footsteps, he’s a freshman at Taylor University in Indiana. Majoring in Computer Science – like his dad and myself. This summer he got a job working at Pinebrook Bible Conference in the Poconos – the place where our family gets together for a week each year.

Each of our four grandsons from PA got to spend a month in FL with their cousins this year. Caleb went from mid-April to mid-May (so that he’d be back home before final exams). Isaiah went from mid-June to mid-July (coming back when Chris and family came up for our week at Pinebrook). Ethan then went back with them and in late August we did a swap so Asher was there until mid-September (doing his first three weeks of school from there). See below for our annual picture of all 7 grands together – Tiernan is now 6’!

Tiernan is in his junior year and Ilyanna in 8^th grade and continue to be homeschooled. Our four PA grands continue with Liberty University Online Academy. Ethan (8^th grade) works with Kim. His social studies class this year is Geography and he’s in pre-algebra. I have the other three boys each day (school hours are 9-11:30 and 2-3:30/4). Isaiah and Caleb are in 6^th (middle school!!) and Asher in 4^th. Donna was going to be doing Bible and Literacy with Asher, but she has a lot on her plate taking care of her plants (both inside and outside) and other activities so I’ve ended up overseeing all of Asher’s subjects. See below for what my den looks like every day!

This fall we were blessed to have two visits from family members. My brother Edd and his wife Ingrid came back to the US from their position as missionaries to Thailand. They were with us for a day as they visited their supporters on the East Coast before officially retiring the end of January. Then a few weeks later our nephew, Matt VanDeCar and his wife and children stopped by for a day as they had come to PA for a wedding. We had not seen them since we went to MI for their wedding several years ago. It’s nice that we can continue to be in close contact with all of my and Donna’s siblings and many of their children even though we are scattered all around the US.

 

Medical/Health

As I noted last year, I had begun the screening process for a drug-based Alzheimer’s study but was awaiting the administration of a brain PET scan at the beginning of 2023. The results of that PET scan showed that I had no amyloid in my brain, so I did not have any incipient Alzheimer’s and was unlikely to. So I did not qualify for that study, however I continue my involvement in a number of other studies.

Donna and I are now in our mid-70s but in relatively good health. The only exception is the continuing problem I’m having with the wound on the bottom of my right foot. After an operation last year and a long healing process, I thought that I could finally put that behind me. Then this fall, for an unknown reason, the wound opened up again. So I’m once again having to rebandage it every few days, staying off my feet as much as possible, and going through the healing process. This is now going on six years (!!!) and it’s a bit frustrating. But if that’s the only physical/mental issue I have to deal with, then I suppose I should be grateful as many others my age have a lot more issues.

 

Genealogy

This past summer was the 100^th annual meeting of the Pierpont Family Association. We met at Mill Plain Church in Waterbury, the site of our first meetings back in the 1920s. As the co-historian of the group, I made a couple of presentations. Then this fall the other co-historian, my 3^rd cousin Bob Kraft, passed away at the age of 89. Since he also lived in PA, I was blessed to be able to attend his memorial service and spend some time talking to his wife and some of his children. I’ll miss working with him and we’re still working out the details of how to continue all the work that he had been responsible for.

I’ve also continued my research into all the members of our church here in PA – where I’m in distant cousin relationship with about 2/3 of everyone there. It’s something that I enjoy doing and the results are appreciated.

 

Writing

Following on the heels of my 3-part book series of the adventures of Fred Forchelli last year, I wrote two more detective stories in early 2023. Both of them were written by the fictional friend of Fred – Betty Rubble. They are also available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle versions (see below).

Otherwise, I also continue posting in my blog. I added 35+ entries this year and am approaching 650 entries since I began my blog nearly 9 years ago.  It’s also approaching nearly 2000 pages (at 8.5x11 size) – a lot of writing over that period of time.

 

Miscellaneous

This spring our local power company began the process of replacing the power transmission poles behind our house (they were about 50 years old). Doing so required the building of a thick wooden plank road across our property. So, except for a couple of times in the spring, we’ve been unable to mow the back yard and we periodically get large trucks or front end loaders driving down that “road”. The lines are finally complete and we hope to have the “road” removed in the next week or so (the planks a few properties away were removed two weeks ago), but we have no idea what the ground will look like afterwards. But it’s definitely affected any property plans we had for this year. And I haven’t been able to help anyway due to my foot problems. Next year?

 

Concluding Thoughts

I get a little jealous when I see family and friends around our age who are “retired”, taking extended vacations or cruises, etc. Homeschooling our grandchildren means those types of activities are not available to us. And I get tired enough each day that I appreciate being able to take a nap after lunch before beginning our afternoon session. But the opportunity to have that kind of relationship with our grandchildren is not something I really want to trade. I talk to some of our senior friends at church who look after their grandchildren perhaps one afternoon a week and the typical response is, “I could never do what you’re doing!” But we do it and in some ways it keeps us young. So while traveling or cruises are not in our immediate future (it will be 7 years before the youngest is off to college), we have a good life.

 

Wishing all our family and friends a very merry Christmas,

Alan and Donna

 

[Grandchildren]

 

[Homeschooling]

 

[Book]

 

[Power poles]

 

[Reason Season]

 

Finding a Cousin by Using DNA

Background

I’ve been using ancestry.com as the primary place for storing all my ancestral research since 2008. So, I have a large number of individuals in my extensive family tree. I also bought a DNA kit from them about 8 years ago and have used it extensively. In order to extend the reach of my DNA research, I also loaded my DNA results into GEDmatch – a DNA tool that allows people who use not only ancestry.com but other DNA analysis tools such as 23andMe to search for relatives based on shared DNA. I had used this tool at the time to find a few new relatives, but I’ve not used it actively for a couple of years. Thus, I was surprised to get a message from GEDmatch this weekend announcing that I had a new match to be checked out.

 

My New Match

The information in GEDmatch is fairly technical. It shows the total length of matched DNA, the largest matched segment, an estimate of how close the match is (e.g. 4.00 is a 4^th cousin – but numbers are never that precise so it might give anywhere from 3.8-4.2 or so), haplogroups, etc. It tells where the DNA test is from (ancestry, 23andMe, MyHeritage, etc.). And it gives a name/alias that the individual has given and an email address that you can use to contact them. You can sort the matches by any of these fields, with the default being the match closeness. For example, my closest match is my niece who used 23andMe this past January and the degree of that match is 1.54 – pretty close to the actual 1.50 that she actually has.

I was surprised that this new match was in the 3^rd cousin range, i.e. someone relatively close to me. But who was this individual? The name/alias was “Momoffivekids”. That would seem to indicate that it was a female and the sex of the individual was “F”. With five children, she would not be very young. And her email address was of the form FLLLLLLYY, i.e. a fairly common usage where the individual uses their first initial, last name, and a two-digit number which is often either their birthyear or some other significant date. In this case the YY was “62” which I believed would be their year of birth.

Thus, my new cousin was female, had a first name that started with “H”, a last name of “M_____”, and she had been born in 1962. (Note that for privacy purposes, I’ll not be giving exact names.) But with 5 children, the “M_____” is probably her married name, so that’s going to present an additional challenge in making a family tree for her and determining how she is related to me!

 

Initial Searching

While searching using an email address is usually not very successful, I thought I’d give it a try anyway. I was pleasantly surprised to get one hit – in a document on a proposal for a community health advocacy program in New Mexico from 20 years ago. It was a 75-page document that included a 7-page list of all the task force members, including their email addresses. Now I had a full first name and a state (or at least where she lived 20 years ago).

I next did a search using that information, i.e., “H_____ M_____” and “New Mexico”, to see what else I could find. I was quickly able to find her current address, her husband’s name, and the names of a few of those five children. But then, farther along the list of results, there was another page that gave even more detailed information. H____ and her husband were running the Spanish ministry of a church in the area and were listed among the church leaders. It gave a brief bio for each of them, noting that she was born in Michigan, moved to CA as a teenager, met and married her husband in 1980, and that they had 5 children (confirmation of the info in her alias). It also had a picture of the two of them.

Ok, so now I know who this new cousin is. But how do I find how she is related to me?

[H____]

 

Family Tree Research

[Before beginning H’s ancestral tree, I thought I’d see if I could find her using social media (e.g., Facebook) because she had a somewhat unusually spelled first name. There were only a handful of people with her first/last name, but I was quickly able to determine that one of those was for her since I had a picture to match. She had a minimal amount of information there, but there was a good picture of her entire family, i.e., she, her husband, and all five children. But she was not accepting new friends.]

The best place to start looking for ancestors of living individuals is often obituaries. I searched using her name, state, and the word obituary. I was able to find one somewhat sparse entry – an obituary for one of her sisters from over 20 years ago. But this was valuable as it mentioned that her mother had predeceased her and gave her mother’s last name, “T_____” (of course, that being her mother’s married name, not her maiden name). But that meant that H_____’s maiden name was “T_____” and was another piece of valuable information.

Ancestry.com hides a lot of information on living individuals. But I now had the names of some individuals who were no longer living – H’s sister and her mother. I started a partial tree with what I had thus far – putting the full name and birth/death years of the sister, the maiden name and year of birth of H, the full name of H’s husband, the first name of H’s mother, and the last name of H’s father. Now I would be able to use the power of the hint/search capability of Ancestry.com!

I quickly found a marriage record for H in California – and that supplied me with her middle initial. Then death records for H’s sister gave me the full names of her mother and father. Continuing up the tree, adding one generation at a time, I worked through the various hints. In particular following the women in H’s maternal line, it went back from CA to the Midwest, then finally to her great-grandmother who had been born in CT – and whose name I recognized.

I checked my own family tree and found that I had her great-grandmother already there and her grandmother as well. I then added in the other generations going down so I could discard the partial tree I had just created.

I have now confirmed that H_____ M_____ is indeed my 3^rd cousin and exactly how she is connected to me. The initial hint from GEDmatch has resulted in my identification of a living and previously unknown (to me) relatively close cousin – and one who is at least interested enough in her genealogy to take a DNA test and load it into GEDmatch.

I’ve sent this information to her and am eagerly awaiting her response!

 

Spelling Words

             Each week our grandsons have new spelling words as part of their literacy curriculum. This past week, the list of spelling words for fourth grade were based on words with the “-r” sound – noting that this includes words with “-er,” “-ir,” and “-ur”. So, some of the words were percent, circus, and surprise. I noted that all of these words have to be memorized, as it’s not obvious from the sound which vowel is supposed to be used. For example, these three words could just as easily have been spelled “purcent,” “cercus,” and “sirprise” and they would be pronounced fine.

            This set the creativity in my brain off. As I pondered all the words in this category, the thought came to me about cases where there are words with different vowels but the same “-r” sound and they are pronounced the same way. So, without boring you anymore, here is the little story that came to my mind…

 

            In the mountains and valleys of West Virginia, they enjoy eating all kinds of things. And unlike those of us who live in cities and suburbs, there are other kinds of animals that grace their menu – things like possum and squirrel. But in addition to eating the meat, the other parts of the animal can be put to good use, including the pelt and fur. After removing it from the animal, it must be scraped and dried. One of the methods of drying is to spread the hide on a small tree. In one small community, a man named John has perfected this art and has begun selling his wares. He takes a small evergreen tree, perhaps 5’-6’ tall, cuts it down and nails a couple of crossed boards to the base. He then removes all the needles and small branches. What is left works really well for hanging/draping the drying pelts.

            One day a friend of his was walking by John’s cabin and noticed that John had another brand-new drying tree sitting next to the front door. Being curious, he knocked on the door and when John answered, he asked, “Who is the fur fir fer?”