Proceed with Caution: New Year Ahead

Proceed with Caution:

New Year Ahead

After many years of blogging, I have been taking a break to write a family history book about my maternal grandparents and their lives. It is going to take awhile. 

So this year, I am going to participate in Amy Johnson Crow's 52 Ancestors Project so that I have something to share in my Granite in MY blood blog. That blog is by far, my most popular one so I will reach more readers there instead of here. 

My paternal ancestors came here from Scotland, New Year's Eve is a big deal there and I set aside today to think about them and the hard life they lived. DNA has confirmed that my cousins that descend from that line match me and that makes me happy since it has been hard and expensive to track them back.

Today, as I think of them, I am posting a quote from this book, found at Google Books of Scottish proverbs, published in 1876.

My favorite quote is about the topic of Caution. Being careful with your genealogy work bears repeating, especially with investigations of DNA. This quote is on page 5.

Birthdays are For The Birds

My 2nd birthday present from my maternal grandfather
December 4, 1949

Birthdays are for the Birds
The Year of the Wrinkled Owl

Turning 70 tomorrow will be a big milestone for me. I have now outlived the only grandfather that I knew. He was 69 when he died of renal failure in 1955. I made the most of being with him because I was only 7 when he died.  

He was on dialysis treatment, it was a big deal in those days as it was a machine that took up a whole room in a Boston hospital. The days after treatment, he would feel better and we would spend time looking at the birds in his yard and watching things that made him laugh on TV. He bought one for my parents house and one for his house sometime in 1953 because I remember the coronation of Queen Elizabeth

Very vaguely, I remember my maternal great grandfather (my grandmother's father) coming to visit.  He died in November of 1949. The old people in my life were a great joy and have become even more vividly remembered to me through my years of research.

My maternal grandmother lived to be 98 and my daughter remembers her well. The TV brought the world to her and helped her stay alive when she was bedridden. Technology helps us live the life we have now. We are so lucky to have what we have today despite the annoying bad news.

My paternal grandparents had a much harder life. They died at 50 and 53. They produced four children who lived long lives. None of us first cousins remembered our grandparents but I was told stories about them. I've researched them extensively.

I remember my parents turning 70 and then 80. It seemed that they got slower but time passed more quickly. 

I am trying to keep moving forward. But, generally, life in the first year of old age is for the birds. My mother told me that she didn't have wrinkles until after she was seventy. That was untrue but we nodded in affirmation anyway. I have a wrinkle near my eye that bothers me. I resorted to eye cream that is expensive. Such is life in the fast lane.

I might not blog as much as I used to but I am still researching and writing. What keeps you young?