Currently, it's 10˚ C and mostly cloudy in Fort Erie. Tonight's predicted low is 1˚ C, and tomorrow's predicted high is 7˚ C.
I had one of my vicious sick spells this week, so I couldn't enjoy Remembrance Day (if that's the right word for it). Most of the public celebrations were cancelled around here, but I had intended to walk down to the cenotaph, observe two minutes of silence, and pray. That didn't happen, because I barely made it out of bed before 11:00. I did manage to post a link to a song called A Pittance of Time (which captures my feelings about the event pretty well) to Facebook before the end of the day, though.
When my ethernet switch attempted a 1½ gainer off my filing cabinet, I had to admit that the ethernet cord leading to my file sharing machine just wasn't long enough to suit the purpose, so rather than buy a new, longer, ethernet cable, I decided to rearrange my desk to move the computer closer to the switch. (I've actually been planning to do that for some time, but kept putting it off.) The new location meant that the cord for the old keyboard I had been using with it was too short, so I swapped keyboards, and then realised that the space bar on that old keyboard works... erratically. So, I ordered a new keyboard. (I know, an ethernet cable would have been cheaper, but the new location does sorta kinda work better in other ways.)
Our family has a history with keyboards. The first thing I ever gave to the woman who is now the light of my life and the delight of my eyes was a keyboard, because one of the keys on her keyboard didn't work, and it annoyed me when people would criticise her for her weird spelling. Between the two of us, I've had to replace multiple keyboards since. (I have no idea why we go through so many of them. You'd think we play basketball with them or something. I'd frame them and hang them in the living room, but there'd be so many that people would think that it was a parts warehouse or something.)
After taking a six-week break from WikiTree, I was looking at my French, Slade, and Welch One Name Studies, trying to figure out which one was most overdue for a quarterly update. But, looking things over, I decided that focusing in on just those three surnames, out of the 32 surnames in the four most recent generations of our two families, was pretty neglectful of the rest. There's a limit of 7 One Name Studies that any one person is allowed to manage. (Possibly somebody who is retired and could spend most of the day "genealogising" could manage that, but honestly, I can't even see me starting a fourth One Name Study.) So, rather than starting any more studies, I just picked the 12 surnames that already have One Name Studies started for them, and then the 12 surnames with the least number of profiles on WikiTree, and decided to work on one of each per month. I sorted each list from largest to smallest, and assigned a month to each pair.
This month's surname with a One Name Study is Waddell. I see that it's categorised as needing a Coordinator, but I'm not volunteering, although I did copy and paste the same sort of material that I had put up on my other studies onto that page. Now, I'm trying to add Waddells from ThePeerage.com and Wikipedia onto WikiTree. I should also try to source and connect existing Waddells where I can.
The second Waddell I added from ThePeerage.com, Eliza Waddell, worked out pretty well. Her husband was already on WikiTree, so her profile was connected upon creation. But her husband's mother wasn't on WikiTree (even though her parents were), so I added the mother and connected Eliza through a second path. Then, I connected her husband to his first wife, and connected Eliza through a third path.
I really like it when I manage to stitch together existing profiles that way. I figure that making direct connections like that is bound to reduce the number of degrees of separation between at least some people, and as we find and make more of those connections, we should find lower degrees of separation all over the place. (I remember when Queen Elizabeth was the main connection anchor, and every month or two, my degrees of separation from her would drop a little bit. I always assumed that was because people were making those extra connections somewhere along the path.)
The surname without a study is Pudder. With only 11 profiles, I don't think anybody will be starting a Pudder Name Study any time soon. But I can report that all 11 Pudder profiles are connected to the main tree, and none of them are marked as unsourced, so what Pudder profiles lack in quantity, they make up for in quality. Go, Pudders!
