Tika & Stuff That Sticks

Again, a boating-water day but this time Big Trouble. Walking Tika along the beach, she tangled with the most horrible, most sticky, most nasty weed that just snagged into her fine fur and stuck all over. Despite the pretty yellow flowers, it was an awful mess and we could not fully clean her up until we got home to her comb and the nasty stuff had dried. (The driftwood pieces are "project treasures.")

So what does Tika's sorry plight have to do today with genealogy? How often do the wrong or incorrect ancestors get snagged into our genealogy? We might try our best to pluck them out but there they stick. Simple solution: do not add them into your family history in the first place. (Had I been aware of that nasty bush I would never have let Tika near it.) And "that's hard to do" you say? Well, yes, but if you do good research and verify everything, every link, every ancestor as a "for sure" ancestor, that won't happen. Too many of us wander through online family trees and allow "bad" ancestors to stick to our tree. No good. (I'll be watchful for that plant now and never let her near it.) Let's all just do good genealogy and find "good" ancestors to stick to our tree.

Tika & Hot Days

August 17th, and Spokane has been having temps in the high 90s for several weeks. At first it was good, after a totally rainy May and June, BUT enough already. Even Tika was looking at the deck thermometer and sighing. And this after I emptied the warmed-by-the-sun dog water pan over her to cool her off.

Tika recommends, and I must agree, the thing to do on such a very hot day is to give great thanks if you have air conditioning and then stay indoors and read a good book! Or do FamilySearch Indexing..... which Tika supports in theory but does not do.

Tika & Me & My Cousin & Family Names

June and Ruth Gurney were sisters born in 1919 and 1921. Ruth married first and named her first daughter June Ellen. June named her first daughter Donna Ruth. And so two cousins were "born."

Junie lives in Georgia and we don't manage to rendezvous too often.......... "life has a way of getting in the way of things and stuff we like to do"........ but she was here last week and we went boating out on Long Lake (really the Spokane River). Handy Man was our boat driver!

We got to thinking and talking about family names. My mom is June Magdalen after her (and Ruth's) grandmother who came from Germany. June Ellen married Bill and their only son was Bill and his son is Bill/William.  I married a John and our first son was John Benjamin and second son was Timothy Francis (after his grandfather). Timothy's son is John Grady (after both grandfathers). 

We do like to use family names repeatedly, don't we??

Tika remembers she has at least one sister...... there were two puppies in the pet shop. Alas, no first cousins in Tika's side. And she, being a dog, really does not care. People care about those things.

Tika & Family, Unhappily

This is Tika asking me, "How come HE is in my house? And how come you are paying attention to HIM?"

"He" was a Cream Golden Retriever named Dozer (short for Bulldozer no doubt) that belongs to our grandson, JT and new wife, G. We got to keep Dozer for the week they were off on their honeymoon. At just over two months, Dozer was already twice Tika's size but no matter, she really put him in his place.... she'd bare her teeth and growl as he was tumbling her over.

My answer to her was this: "Tika, sometimes you just have to put on your big girl collar and buck up and do what needs to be done, especially where family is concerned. It's only for ten days for goodness sake!" 

Isn't that good advice for life? Where family is concerned, we must try our hardest to accomodate. Sometimes we cannot but we should always "put on our big girl collar" and try. Best advice ever.