Dealing With A/C or Not . . .

It's almost embarrassing that amidst the heat of the week, we actually used the heat from the furnace a few times this week -- in the early morning hours that is.

For some reason the weather was so strange this week that we went from one extreme to another sometimes all in the same day. And for two straight days we used no a/c at all, just good old fashioned ventilation -- which is preferable to us.

 In the above you can see the thermometer almost reaching the century mark on one day. The other pics are of some of the current blossoms in the yard. In the middle picture you can see a hard-working bee doing whatever they do. It is nice to see a lot of bees and humming birds working on the flowers.

I was again lucky this past week in that there were two excellent webinars presented  by Legacy Family Tree Webinars:

The first one was on working through the process of naturalization. This is a subject that I want to explore more in that it is really fascinating to learn of the details of immigrants and what they went though to move to our country.

The second webinar was another one about what I feel is one of the most confusing areas to deal with and that is DNA. This time it was a peek into the process that Geoff Rasmussen used as he dealt with the test results from Ancestry DNA.

It is going to take several more sessions and lots of work for me to feel comfortable with this but over time I should "get there". In the meantime, I keep receiving more and more news of matches from all three testing sites . . . now I just have to make the connections.

In the last couple of posts I have made reference to communicating with a new found cousin from Norway.

The information that he shared got me started digging into more of the details about the branches stemming from the Thorbjornsen connection.

In the above graph -- click on it to enlarge --  you can see my Great Grandparents, Samuel and Elise Martin and then their family.  But the attention in this graphic is on Samuel's sister, Ann, who married a man named Mads Madsen.

Ann is my 2nd Great Aunt and her children then are 1st Cousins and in this chart her son, Ingebrigt Madsen is a 1st Cousin. He married Hulda Emma Hansen and their children are my 2nd Cousins -- and there is a lot of them -- 10 or so. And if you notice they have changed the spelling of their surname from "Madsen" to "Matson", more Americanized.

So, while Henry is a 2nd Cousin, his children are my 3rd Cousins.

And you can see his five children pictured in the chart to the right.

Thank Ancestry.com for their Yearbook Database as I found each of the children with pictures from Carl Schurz High School in Chicago.

I also found a couple of college photos for two of them -- one from North College and one from Wheaton College.

I believe that three of the five children are still living, so it would be nice to maybe communicate with them as I -- before this last week did not know of their existence.

There are 10 2nd Cousins and so I have a lot of material to search and find.

I am working on another story having to do with Marvin Matson.

It will be interesting to learn about his family.



All work and no play would not be fun . . .

The play here is actually the Major League Baseball standings so far this season.

Clicking on the chart you can see that the San Francisco Giants currently have the best record in all of baseball.

We have watched every game -- admittedly we have fast-forwarded through some innings . . .

We especially like the games that are played in the Eastern time zone or Central because the games start earlier in the day and we can record and watch them in the late afternoon or early evening.

AND, coming up this Tuesday is the All Star game.

This year it is being played in San Diego so even though it is in our time zone, the game is scheduled early enough for us to record it and enjoy -- which we hope to do.

I can only imagine what it was like to create a family tree in the "good old days".

But the image to the right is amazing and all of it done without a computer or the internet.

The women folk were smart to not participate in this family tree -- at least photographically.

And so, that is a peek into our week.

See you all "in a few".