Celebrating and Genealogy Things

It has been a beautiful week in terms of weather and many other things. My week consisted of a few webinars relating to genealogy, a continued and successful effort to clean files electronically -- as I had as one of my goals for the year -- I am actually close to reaching a plateau with reaching below having a backlog of close to five thousand docs now down to just above three thousand -- this number keeps adjusting every day in both directions. But the real focus of this week has been Gail -- she has reached another milestone and we celebrated that in her style:

Her celebration day is really more like a week and the above flowers were given to her from the "girls from HRB" along with a luncheon and other tributes.  The floral arrangement was inserted in a beautiful "frog" which is a great addition to the rather extensive frog collection that Gail has.

As I mentioned -- I attended some webinars this week -- one of those was on what is called "Family Finder" from Family Tree DNA and the webinar was delivered by Relative Roots. The topic of DNA to me is very complex and it gets really confusing really fast. The connection to Gail is that to use DNA to research a family normally requires that a male member donates his cheek swabbings and then the results are related to the Y-DNA passed from father to son to son and so on . . .

In Gail's family -- and in her family tree -- there are no known male family members from which to take a cheek sample. So the traditional test is out. There are two other tests available in her case -- one would be the mtDNA test which shows results passed from mother to mother and so on. And the test that the webinar that I attended has to do with testing chromosomes that could identify more distant relatives like cousins and uncles and aunts.

As you can see (click to make larger) in this tree for Gail, her dad, Millard -- Jim -- Bouldron is about the last male in the tree. We have searched the U.S. and have not found any other male Bouldrons.
So it is up to the female members of the Bouldron group to run some tests if they wish.

Meantime, another floral arrangement arrived:

These beautiful flowers were delivered by Olivia and her mom, Silvia (who is like a daughter to Gail) and they had a nice time visiting for a bit -- and how it got to another level I am not really certain -- but I was called in for a photo opportunity. Do not draw any conclusions regarding the photo -- but the last time that the garment in question had been worn was about 50 years ago -- it could use some pressing and maybe some adjustments but it still was "fun" to model . . .

So, there was a huge variety of activities all relating to Gail throughout the week. Below is a collage of some of the other events that are tied to 70 years ago -- all somehow relating to her:

 

Who knew that M&Ms were from 1941 and/or that Cheerios made their debut the same year as Gail. The newspaper shows what dominated that year and several to come and the autos were just an example of what was around in those days. So the big day for us was:

We beelined for dinner at the Dry Creek Kitchen in the Hotel Healdsburg where we did not scrimp on the menu -- it probably was the most enjoyable dinner that we have had (out) for quite some time. The weather was perfect and sitting on the outside patio was sooo relaxing . . . we won't soon forget the evening.

While writing all this -- from my office window I was treated to the following visitors -- looking for water and vegetation:

And so it went for our great week -- genealogy and celebrating!

Even though we were enjoying "haute cuisine" last evening we look forward to sliders tonight. See you all in a few.