Well it was a long night and consequently a late morning rising - but hey I had nowhere else to be. The weather was quite good but for some reason I thought the clouds looked menacing so I didn't take advantage of the day by heading either up or downhill. Have I mentioned that there really is no flat place to walk? It's a matter of degree of incline - and today I was not inclined in any direction to any degree.
I did make a pot of soup - well a small pot - and put the new blender to the test. Success! However, this was not progress towards my genealogy goals. It did use up some carrots, parsnips, an onion and an apple - sprinkled with some of the new spice collection. But I wanted progress - backwards in time.
Out came the laptop and I spent considerable time trying to chase down the baptism record of Annie Fennell, my great great grandmother, well, one of them. Going backwards in time gives you exponentially more relatives. You are not nearly alone on the branches of your tree. Annie has been pretty elusive, appearing in the odd census and in the Fitzpatrick family bible. Apart from that her shyness has been carefully preserved. Likewise for her siblings.
How is it that almost none of my ancestors did anything newsworthy? They never even stole a loaf of bread, or a neighbour's chicken? No arrests for public drunken behaviour. They must have misbehaved behind closed doors. How about a skeleton in the closet or a ghost on the stairs? Actually, there was one of those but he's on the other side of the family tree. A story for another time.
I figured that a page by page review of the parish records now online, which yielded info on the marriage of Annie's parents and baptisms of a few of her siblings, might do the trick. Hah! The only trick was that the vanishing act of Annie's is still working. I did keep finding records for a Patrick Fitzpatrick which was the name of Annie's husband but it's not the same chap. Just one relative with an unusual name would be worth celebrating. Just one - please!
So - still no progress. Maybe switching to the writing tasks would be a good move. Well, that turned out to be simply re-reading what I'd written and simply adding a few commas and changing a word or two. Aggie's Dash is still a work in progress. I need one date and it is not available online. It's in an Ottawa city directory at Library and Archives Canada in the original hardcopy directory, or at a few other locations on microfilm. Not a single one of them is available to me here. My plans to uncover the information before leaving kept getting derailed by snow storms.
Saved by the bell - or whatever one would call the unusual ring tone of my brand spanking new local mobile phone. I've finally figured out how to swipe correctly to answer it - once I recognized what the dinging was all about. It was Tom Byrne calling with an invitation to come over this evening - so I went.
I brought along the few things I had brought for the young lads. The biggest hits were the small cars - a New York Yellow Cab and a NYPD fire truck I'd purchased from a street vendor on the Brooklyn Bridge. Who knew that a young lad in Ireland "had always wanted" a NY taxi? Who knew that he'd even seen one - but that's the magic of television. They also loved the miniature hockey sticks and balls. I'll make Canadians out of them yet - Senators fans at least.
The evening was spent in interesting conversation with the Byrnes and a couple who had also dropped in, and of course included a mighty tasty little slice of Ann's apple pie.
We chatted until much later in the evening than I'd anticipated before I finally pointed the car back towards Bunclody. It's about a 20 minute drive during which I encountered only 3 other cars on the road. Now it's late again and I'm snug in the cottage wondering what is causing the motion-activated light to keep coming on outside. It's likely the wind which is picking up quite a lot and blowing something within range of the sensor. It has just gone off again and so shall I to the land of nod, I hope.
Tomorrow I shall attempt to do something worthy of more than these ramblings.
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