The Great Freeze, the Great Heaps and the Great That Wasn't

The key-words this week have been 'Cold' and 'Feet'.  And, I have to admit, at the ends of the day, the rest of me has been quite chilled, too.  No, I'm not suffering from any illness (at least not that I know of); it's just that the sun is so high in the sky near the solstice that it never reaches the far end of the lounge where I work.  With the outside temperature being so high, and considering the time of year, it seems unreasonable to have the storage heaters running ... and in the middle of the day it can get a bit overwhelming even at the cold end!  The result is that, while I happily sat out in the sunshine to read the other afternoon, in the mornings and evenings I've been sitting in a fleece to keep warm.

My holiday is approaching, in mark of which a pile of stuff is accumulating in the corner of the room that has been mentally labelled 'Suitcase'; meanwhile a smaller gathering is coming together on the sideboard under the aspiration of becoming hand-luggage.  I'm hopeful of getting some decent pictures to satisfy those friends who say 'can't wait to see the results' ... and also to post on here, of course.

Amid all the preparations, my family history has not escaped attention.  I finished my latest batch of census transcriptions yesterday, and have been drawing to a close the lengthy verification exercise on my own research, checking out the data provided by someone who proved to be a bit unreliable.  This afternoon saw the finish of that exercise, and after a brief lull and the tidying up of a few loose ends, I shall embark on a similar batch of information from a different source.  Hopefully, it will be done by Christmas ... but I've heard that saying before, somewhere!

A little side-shoot from this came yesterday, when I discovered the record of the burial of an unmarried lady who was the sister of my great-great-great-great-grandmother.  It had been assumed that this lady was the wife of a great-great-great-great-grandfather.  Had this been so, and had the two great-great-great-great-grandmothers been sisters, it would have meant that my grandparents were second cousins, a rather nice rounding-off of the family story, and one that would have been quite possible in a relatively small area of north Suffolk.  I was surprised to find such precise evidence, but not really surprised that it existed for, had those two really been sisters, the elder one (the one who I've now found never married) would have borne her two youngest children when she'd passed the age of 47 ... not impossible, I know, but highly unlikely at the time of Trafalgar!

Now I have another set of records to discover ... but that won't be how I'm spending my holiday!