Canada the Beautiful

Fellow blogger David Folstad recently started a new series on his blog called O Canada. Needless to say, I can’t think of a better theme, so, in the spirit of David’s new Canada series, when the following pictorial tour of Canada came my way the other day in an email chain, I knew it was something I wanted to share. I don’t know who started this off, but whoever it was, thank you so much. (Thanks to Ernie for forwarding it to Bill and to Bill for including me on his email list!)

Here goes.

Our country is the world’s second largest in size. It’s incredibly diverse and often looks nothing like people imagine it. Let’s get a taste of how diverse Canada is in terms of architecture and landscapes. I hope you enjoy the tour.

Map Monday: A look at Europe in maps (including the UK, sorry Brexiters)

Here’s a small collection of maps that describe various interesting aspects of Europe – a few serious, a few very much not serious. 🙂

In case you’re thinking of taking a cycling trip in Europe.In case you’re wondering where to eat in different countries.

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks (16): From the Netherlands to New Netherland to New Jersey with my 8-great grandfather

I have to admit that I’ve skipped back to the very early days of my family tree again because I wanted to “use” one of my early ancestors who came from the Netherlands to New Netherland to introduce some history I’ve just learned recently. I know, kind of a roundabout way to get there, but what the heck. If you have the patience to read a little about someone who made some intriguing life decisions nearly 400 years ago, you’ll be treated to this historical tidbit at the end.

In order to find an ancestor who fit the bill – lived in the part of New Netherland that became New Jersey instead of New York – I traced back on one of my many x-great grandmothers and then went way back 10 or 11 generations (I’m the 11^th in this case) to find Epke Jacobse Banta, my 8-great grandfather on my mother’s side. (Did you know that we all have 1024 8-great grandfathers?! And that they are likely to have contributed to in the order of 250,000 descendants!!)

Once I found Epke Jacobse, it wasn’t difficult to find information about his life, even though it was so long ago. I am really, really blessed by all the digging into records done by previous genealogy sleuths, much of which is now online. And I suppose if he’s left that many descendants, it’s not so surprising that at least one of them would have gone digging.

Caregivers, elder care, and selfcare

Last week two fellow bloggers happened to post about their challenges with parental elder care on the same day. The one that started my day was LA at Waking Up on the Wrong Side of 50, whose post for the day, Calm,  described her difficulties and frustrations in watching her parents age and needing her help, which they don’t always receive with grace. Shortly after reading LA’s post, I read Vicki’s, at Victoria Ponders, who wrote a piece about the challenges – and rewards – of being caregiver to her mother as she sunk into dementia and to her older sister, who has lifelong developmental handicaps. The subtitle of her post was Care and Keeping.

These stayed with me because they speak to the challenges that our friends’ kids are facing, just as our kids could be facing anytime in the near (I hope not too near) future. They also speak to the challenges that some of our friends are facing as they become caregivers to their spouses. In other words, I’m part of that slowly fading away final cohort, the elderly (unless you want to run for president of the U.S.; then you’re exempt!). I thought it might be useful to add to the conversation from the elder perspective.

I have to be honest. My husband and I were “spared” having to go through elder care with any of our parents. I put that in quotes because I would have given anything to have had my parents for another 25-30 years and then dealt with whatever came. My FIL went quite quickly in his early 70s, without at-home care coming into it, and my beloved MIL passed away a week before her 97^th birthday after having had remarkably few needs that one could have called care, and definitely not of the demanding kind. She came to live near us and then with us in her later years (this started when she was 79, a year older than I am now), and cooked her own meals in her apartment downstairs until she went into hospital for her last few weeks. So we have no firsthand experience with what LA and Vicki are speaking of, and what so many others are experiencing now with their aging parents, often while they’re also dealing with challenges with their teenage or young-adult kids. The sandwich generation. I’m sure our kids are hoping we stay as independent and as more or less cooperative as we currently are!

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks (15): A grandmother’s suspicious birthdate, a dancer turned teacher, and a baseball player

In last week’s “episode” (Week 14), I reported on some of what I had uncovered about my grandparents’ (my Mom’s parents) early years by going through old census records and then following up a few “leads” I found there. Some of what I’d uncovered, but not all.

To continue with the uncovering, let’s start with the intriguing mystery of my grandmother’s birthdate. I remember my mother mentioning something about deciding whether to honour her mother’s decades-long concern about being older than my grandfather when she ordered their joint gravestone shortly after my grandfather’s death (and just a very few years after my grandmother’s and my Dad’s deaths). I didn’t pay much attention, but when we were passing through Glens Falls, NY in 2007 we stopped to see the grave and I did see that my grandmother was older than my grandfather by 3 and a half years. Luella Manning Wood, (October) 1881-1964; John Forshee Wood, (March) 1885-1964.

I thought to myself, “Aha, Mom decided to go with the real date.” And that goes along with the marriage certificate that I found in the papers Mom had left concerning the disposition of her parents’ estate (legal estate, not a mansion and lots of land) after my grandfather passed away. It had Luella clearly listed as 33 years old and John as 30.

Thoughtful Thursday: A little food for thought 😊

There are times when we really should stop and think before we speak. These memes help remind us of that reality.

And, I just can’t resist including this one.  Read it as “being stupid”, not “stupid”. No offense intended!

The Solar Eclipse – the Totality – comes to our hometown!

It’s not often (obviously) that a once-in-a-lifetime (or several lifetimes) event/gift of nature comes our way, but this afternoon we hit the jackpot. We not only got to experience the total eclipse of the sun, but we got to experience it in perfect, totally cloudless skies. A miracle!

Map tracing the path of the eclipse in North America. We’re up in the top righthand corner, just past Maine.

Our corner of the path. Perfection.

We thought about where the best place would be to view the eclipse. We were told  that street lights would come on as it got darker; not ideal. We weren’t about to drive into the countryside and sit in a field for a few hours. Actually, we probably would have if we’d been younger, but we really aren’t ‘younger’ these days. So we took two lawn chairs down to the walking trail just behind our house, with the mighty Wolastoq (St. John River) lapping behind us, and took it all in. It turned out to be ideal.

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks (14): How Internet searches helped me piece together my grandparents’ early years

My Dad died when I was 19 and my Mom when I was 28, so I didn’t have the opportunity to ask questions about our family history that I later on sure wished I could. But my Mom did share plenty of stories with me, including some bits and pieces about my grandparents’ (her parents) early years. Those bits and pieces are what helped start the googling process to find more.

We did visit my mother’s relatives fairly regularly; looking back I’m pretty sure she felt that responsibility as one of the few of her generation on either side of her family. It can’t have been a lot of fun; this was a pretty formal/austere set of old folks (from my young perspective), and it required putting us 3 kids into an unseatbelted back seat and driving for 8 hours to upstate New York or 2 hours to northeast New Jersey, crossing Manhattan in the process. But visit they did. So I knew my grandparents pretty well, my grandfather’s maiden and widowed older sisters, my Aunt Clara and Aunt Mary, and to a lesser extent my grandmother’s older brother, my Uncle George. But I knew very little about their “stories”.

I knew that my grandmother had been a teacher, and that she had moved from Lockport, NY, in the Niagara region, to the NYC area, where she somehow met my grandfather.

I knew that my grandmother was older than my grandfather and hadn’t been convinced that they should marry. He reassured her that the age problem wasn’t a difference. Good for me that he was persistent, or I wouldn’t be here writing this!