2021 in Review

 

2021 is another year heading for the record books, unfortunately more due to disasters than for anything positive. Fingers crossed that 2022 will be a year that we can get back to something approaching "normal". In the meantime, here is a review of the topics covered in my blog posts in 2021.

As the year began, I was writing the story of my maternal grandfather, HS Chambers. My first blog posts for the year were inspired by the creative nonfiction work that I was writing about his immigration story and also by the research I had done on his family line which took me back to Northampton. I was able to visit that county in person in the 2000s and carry out research in local archives.

By March I was taking an NGIS course about non-conformist religion in England which led to posts about religion and about the many opportunities for genealogical education.

In May my interest was caught by World War II and how it had affected my family. This led to a plan to read all the books about WWII in my personal library. It turned out to be a bigger task than I thought. I'm still working my way through them.

By August I was thinking about travel, combining a trip to Victoria with looking up a directory entry for a place where my mother had lived at one time and also the place where she had worked. At that point I was also looking ahead to trips planned for 2022.

Towards the end of the year, the topics became more varied, inspired by the weather and books that I read related to genealogy or my family lines. I had also moved on to the planning stage of writing about another ancestor, this time my great grandmother on my maternal line.

As in years past, there were posts about DNA, although I don't seem to have made much headway on genetic genealogy. There is one aspect of genealogy that I have found of particular interest. That's epigenetics, which is basically the turning off or on of gene expression. I hope to explore more about this in the coming year and see if I can find out how it may have affected some of my ancestors.

Images:

Pier 21 in Halifax

Yelvertoft First Congregational Church

180 Shooters Hill Road, a tobacconist’s shop like it was when my grandfather had his shop in that location around the time of WWII

The Hudson’s Bay store in Victoria where I believe my mother used to work

Silhouette of my great grandmother

Books about epigenetics

Happy holidays

 

                     Seasons Greetings to all my readers

                                                                        and

                   may 2022 be a much better year for us all

Getting things in order at the end of the year

 

                                                      A view of Islay where some of my Scottish family came from

Redding the house was one of the Scottish customs mentioned in a recent webinar put on as part of the Scottish SIG at Ontario Ancestors. The custom involved getting the household cleaned and in order at the end of the year to have a fresh start ready for Hogmanay, the greeting of the New Year. That struck a chord.

An end of the year cleanup has sometimes featured in my end of year rituals. But, as much of our lives have moved online, this year I found myself trawling through all those emails I've saved until later, especially the ones on my Gmail account "promotions" tab, with a plan of getting the backlog into more manageable shape. It's surprising what I've missed which I might have been interested in. 

Recent emails to sign up for Rootstech 2022, which is going virtual again this coming year, also reminded me that I set up a playlist of what I wanted to watch for Rootstech 2021. Most of the sessions I tagged still wait unwatched on my list as other virtual events with shorter watching windows took over. It's now time to watch all the sessions I tagged, some of which are surprisingly short. I could have fit them in at any time. Why did I wait so long?

As I go through my Gmail account deleting emails with a sigh of relief and whip my way through my Rootstech playlist, I wonder how much of this end of the year cleanup is down to my Scottish roots. It's interesting the customs we carry on without thinking about where they came from.

Sources:

Scottish end of year customs: https://www.timetravel-britain.com/articles/christmas/hogmanay.shtml

DNA, epigenetics and the family tree

 

As DNA testing became more main stream and databases grew more education was offered on how to use this new genealogical tool. Much of it has left me in the dust, trying to grasp the concepts being taught over and over again. I think I have a handle on the basic concepts but haven't put in the time to colour code my matches that the DNA whizzes I know do automatically. Part of it is a time thing. Like many areas of expertise, it took those whizzes years of practice and work on their own match lists to get their DNA cousins into line. At times it feels like everyone else is in on the secret to successfully using DNA in their family tree research leaving me behind before I start.

What I need is an in. Some researchers seem to have found a fascination with adding ancestors to various line on their family trees. This was all helped along by Ancestry's coloured dots. It reminds me of those students in school, mostly girls, who used coloured tabs to create organized notebooks. They looked so good I envied them but not enough to invest the time to get my own looking that way. So cool coloured dots look to me like a lot of work rather than an enticing coding system.

A more recently recognized aspect of DNA has caught my interest, however. That is epigenetics, the turning off and on of gene expression. When I first read about it, the written sources related it to trauma. Most examples were extreme trauma affecting whole populations as the holocaust and the systematic mistreatment of indigenous peoples were often cited as examples of trauma carried down through the generations. As I hadn't found any link to those groups in my family tree, I thought epigenetics couldn't possibly affect my family. But further reading showed that the effects weren't just a big picture whole population kind of thing, the effects were also seen at the family level.

As I think about the ancestor I'm currently profiling, my maternal great grandmother, I know some of the traumatic events in her life and the life of her family. Perhaps those traumas were carried down to the present day. This deserves more study, DNA related study. Perhaps this is my in into the use of DNA in my family tree.