Currently, it's -5˚ C and cloudy in Fort Erie. Since the predicted hight for today is only -6˚ C, this will probably be as good as it gets. Tonight's predicted low is -11˚ C, and tomorrow's predicted high is -7˚ C.
I started digging out our new-to-us car on Monday, and finally got the last of the driveway cleared off Wednesday afternoon. (No, I didn't work straight through. I would dig until I was breathing heavily, and then come in for a short break, like about 4 hours.
) Since our quarantine ended on Wednesday, we promptly headed out to the post office and four stores to run errands and stock up on things we were either out of, or running low on. (The weird thing is that, even with all the stuff we got, the shopping list of stuff we still need to get takes up nearly half a sheet of paper. Maybe I should learn to write smaller.)
More importantly, Tuesday marked the anniversary of a historic event. I'm pondering on whether to start a fundraiser to purchase a related place to turn it into a national historic site.
On the genealogical front, I finally finished working through the "Let others know what locations you are working on" page, marking branches that have been connected, and bringing each jurisdiction back up to a minimum of five unconnected branches. I spun out a new page for Unconnected Notables in July, so it looks like it's taken me seven months to work through the list. (We need more volunteers to help with that. Seven months is just too long between checks.)
I'm also continuing to work on McNairs and Whites this month. Working through the list of people with a last name of White on Wikipedia is going a bit faster, partly because I'm not even trying to track Whites on ThePeerage.com this month. (Checking 1,579 names looking for matching profiles on WikiTree, and then tracking the state of the profiles I do find, sounds too much like work.) Also, for this first pass, I'm just ignoring all the living Whites on Wikipedia. They do need to be tallied up eventually, but I know I'm not going to get through the whole list this month, so I'm concentrating on deceased Whites for this first pass.
So far, I have made it through the list up to people with first names starting with A through E (which includes some others who are listed on WikiTree under a nickname, or went by their middle names). I've turned up 109 deceased Whites, of whom 29 (26.6%) have profiles on WikiTree. Of those 29 profiles, 18 (62.1%) have at least one primary source, and 21 (72.4%) are connected to the main tree. Oddly, only 19 profiles (65.5%) have Wikipedia listed as a source, so apparently there are 10 people who put up profiles for relatives and don't even know that those relatives are notables!
Incidentally, if anyone would like to take on a surname and track it in this way, just send me a private message and I'll send you a spreadsheet. I have a generic "Name Study Worksheet" (actually, it's an old copy of the spreadsheet for Slades with a bunch of annotations to help you adapt it for your own use), and also name-specific spreadsheets for the surnames that I've been working on over the past few months (Crozier, French, Gerschefske, McNair, Miller, Nickel, Pudder, Rucks, Slade, Waddell, Welch, Westfall, and White). Next month, I plan to cover West and Kelso, so I could get copies of those ready with a little notice. Each spreadsheet tallies up the various measures that I'm tracking, and generates the charts that I include in my reports, so you should be able to generate similar charts for whichever surname you want to work on. (Or, by adding new measures, like, say, whether a profile has at least one image, you could create new charts.)
