Ancestral Musings

Oh my gosh.  I ended up taking a test for COVID-19 last night after a day of headache, runny nose, and sore throat.  Miraculously, the results showed up in my patient portal this morning, negative!  But I spent the night mentally figuring out who I would have to contact and how many people this would be if the test came back positive and resolving that I was going to up my isolation game this week if the test came back negative.  Six months in, it is hard to maintain diligence but it's still important. I'm sure there are actual troublemakers in my family tree (I've talked about a couple of them, Thomas Prewitt, annoying neighbor, and Welthian Loring who complained loudly about being cheated at business by a neighbor in 17th century Salem, Massachusetts and was accused of being a witch for her trouble.  Fortunately, it came to nothing).   However, I am going to talk about this week's struggle with a troublemaking question about my paternal grandfather's...

 Week 32 is supposed to be attached to August 5-11.   Since it is August 26th, you can see that I am behind.  In my defense, my husband had to have a little elbow surgery (30 minutes, maybe that qualifies as "Small"?) but, except for the dog, everything seems to be calming down.  The dog is old, and not small. Unlike the last topic, Large, my family is full of small people, at least my mother's side.  I was the tallest in my generation at 5'4", my mother was 5'3", my sister is 5'1-4" (though she swears she is 5'1").   My mother once told me that her grandmother, Metta May McDuff, was only about 4'10".  My sister's husband is 6'2", a descendant of recent Icelanders, and found us all tiny, to put it kindly.  My girls are in the 5'4-5" inch range, and my sons topped out around 5'9"-10".  And there it is:  a small entry!

I've been busy, that's all I can say.  In addition to the pandemic, we've had a couple of medical events one of which came to nothing and the other resulting in a small surgery on my husband's right elbow the day after tomorrow.  That has meant that I'm doing some of the things my husband normally does which has left me with a little less time and a lot less concentration!  I've dipped into some genealogy every few days but mostly I've left this aside.  But here we are, week 31, "Large", which was supposed to be for July 29 to August 4th!  Hey, I'm only two weeks overdue . . . But:  Large is a tough topic for me.  We are not large people.  We do not live large.  We do not have large tracts of land or large cars.  It seems like most of the families I'm related to were pretty small, mostly two children, which made my four children look like a big family.  However, my paternal grandfather came from a pretty big family and this led to a...

We are still pandemicing away here in Washington state.  As of the end of this past week, restrictions on restaurants returned in a modified form (maximum of 5 people, all from the same household, at a table indoors) due to rising numbers.  This will affect our Taco Tuesdays with my sister and her husband and son but other than that, I don't expect it will be much of a bother. And so to the Old Country.  One of the interesting things about genealogy for me personally has been that it has confirmed my impression that no one on either side of my family remembers or thinks about the Old Country.  The most recent immigrant was early in the 19th century and he in fact may have been just lying about where he came from (he claimed both Ireland and New York on the census in different years).  My husband's family is definitely German on both sides but it has proven very challenging to figure out exactly who it was who did the immigrating.  I will leave them aside fo...