It's 22˚ C in Fort Erie, which was supposed to be the high today, but it's already cooled off from the real high, which was 27˚ C, so the weather report needs to be properly salinated. Also supposedly, it's going to cool down to 12˚ C tonight and only get up to 19˚ C tomorrow. (That would be nice if it's actually true. I'm not designed for this heat. Once it gets over about 25˚ C, I start to wilt, and if it gets over 30˚ C, then I definitely belong at the Dairy Queen in the food fair at the shopping mall. Or I would belong there, if there were any shopping malls in Fort Erie. Or any Dairy Queens.)
Today was gardening day. The light of my life and the delight of my eyes was tending her potato crop (which is returning the love, since the potato patch is starting to look like a very short forest). I dug down to get the last two pieces of one of the compost bins, which had sunk a good 20 centimetres into the ground, so I could reassemble it in a new place. (This time, I put it on paving stones, in hopes that it might actually stay above the ground this time.) There are two more bins to move, so the next jobs are to move all of the stuff which hasn't brewed for quite long enough into the moved and reassembled bin (and move the compost which is actually compost into the garden), and probably to transplant the forget-me-nots which are doing best after the first transplant (again), because they're right in what looks like the best place to put the other two compost bins.
I also mowed most of the front yard, and, in the process, found another bush that I had mowed around last summer, to see what it might be. Alas, I didn't notice it until after I had already mowed several times this year, so the poor thing is back to square one, but I've marked it with a stick, and we'll see how high it gets by fall.
Since it's a new month, I've moved on to working on Welches again. So far, I've been able to put together a starter profile for famed Kansas coach Fran Welch, add a mother for former Senator Frank Welch (who, as it happened, lived in the same town in Nova Scotia where I went to college), and managed to add a source (and a wife) for Manitoba MLA Alexander Robert Welch. But what's surprising to me is how many people listed on Wikipedia don't have Find A Grave entries! (I prefer to find at least one source other than Wikipedia before creating a profile.) I know that the data on FAG is provided by volunteers, just like it is here, but I'm just beginning to realise just how few people are listed there! I've had to skip making profiles for Bettina Welch, Claude E. Welch (Sr.), Claude Raymond Welch, David E. Welch, and Don Welch, for lack of any collaborating source for them. (At least for Canadians, I can look in the census, and BMD records if they lived in the right province.)
This week's tip is about using the Library and Archives Canada site, and particularly the census records. They're a wonderful help in finding family members, so they're a huge boon for Connectors. But sometimes, you need to get creative. As a case in point, take Alexander Welch's wife, Elizabeth Hester (Graham) Welch: in the 1901 census, she was enumerated as "Hester E Welch", so looking for her by her first name wouldn't get a hit. But in the 1911 census, her name (which, to be fair, is pretty faint in the scan) was mistranscribed as "Virginia D" Welch, which is so far wrong that I assume it was transcribed by a computer. All of which is to say that using wild cards, ages, and locations (right down to the page sometimes) can help you find records where the enumerator's handwriting, or the scan, or the transcription, or a combination of all three, have conspired to put erroneous information into the index.
