Welcome to a wintery Weekend Chat, my fellow WikiChatterboxes! And greetings from Cathey’s Creek where we had three days of morning temps in the 20sF. A friend in a higher elevation said one morning where he lives there were wind gusts up to 25 miles an hour. He didn’t have to work in it, but it was a very chilly walk to his car. I consider winter to begin December 1st (today), disregarding that later date as just too late. I wonder if this is a harbinger of things to come.
On the Home Front: Not much going on here, though I did have a young fella from the church helping in the basement a couple of days. Many hands make quick work, they say, but it’s not as if I couldn’t have done things myself. I just work better when I have someone to work with! And, his family desperately needs the extra money, so another reason to employ him. Fortunately for a talker like me, he presents a constant stream of conversation. Work and talk, though, wear me out after a couple of hours, at least that’s the excuse I make for being tired by the time I must run him home.
I will see my surgeon for the last time this coming Monday, and he’ll release me from his care. My therapist on the other hand says we still have some work to do, getting me up to 95% range of motion. Funny thing, my left shoulder, the one I had surgery on, is doing better than my right, so I guess sometime down the road I’ll have that one worked on.
On the Genealogy Front: The kid who is working for me (well, not a kid since he is 18) knows I’m into genealogy. One of the days I dropped him home, he mentioned it to his mom who promptly gave me her husband’s grandfather’s name, date, and location. And of course, you know me. There is never a rabbit hole I’m not willing to dive into headfirst.
Last night I found the grandfather on FS and began entering this family into WikiTree. Two branches connected. One has deep German roots. However, a surprise is that he has Dillard ancestry in Spartanburg County, South Carolina. I have not been able to make the direct connection of the kid’s Dillard ancestor and mine, but same location, same time period. He was shocked and thrilled to find out that we were distant cousins. Our common ancestor, at least, is George Dillard.
I’m reading a book, The Mountbattens, by Antony Lambton. The founder of the Battenburg line was Alexander of Hesse. Though his profile says that it was “rumoured” that Alexander was not the Grand Duke of Hesse’s son, the information collected by the author indicates that all the royals of Europe knew that his actual father was a von Grancy. While the Grand Duke had to acknowledge that his wife’s children, which she had while they were separated, were his so to avoid scandal, the situation seems to have been know by Queen Victoria, Tsar Alexander II of Russia, the Emperor William I of Germany (and, apparently, everyone else, including diplomats who left memoirs).
The Mountbatten Archives were closed to research at the time the author wrote in 1989 (and may still be), and it appears that Lord Louis Mountbatten, in his writings about his family, attempted to cover up an hint of misconduct in his ancestry. Maybe we can get all those Mountbattens to take DNA tests to finally get to the bottom of this. Intriguing!
I hope all of you are finding new avenues of research or are taking the opportunity to strengthen old research. Lately, I’m just following the tunnels where they go.
Enjoy the Chat!
