Rewilding the yard

 The pint-sized native grass in our front yard seems to be six-weeks grama. The six weeks are winding down for the summer, with most of the plants turned to fine straw. I suppose it won't be the keystone plant for a mini-meadow, but it's welcome to do its thing. Meanwhile, I'm still battling

• Legions of goatheads (puncturevine)
• Very robust red-rooted amaranth
• Not-too-bothersome prostrate sandmat and prostrate knotweed
• Quick-growing quackgrass
• Bristlegrass sneak attacks on clothing and gloves
• A bounty of bindweed

The northeast part of the yard is pretty dry, probably from all the afternoon sun. The crabapple on the northwest decided to try for a second round of blooms in early September. I think the poor thing is confused and knows I'm not terribly fond of it. Still, I built up a saucer-shaped pile of compost and have been covering it with two sheets of cardboard from our abundance of moving boxes.

The neighborhood honeybees remain very busy at the Russian sage. I'd like to add many more flowers for them over the next few years. One friend says it will take years to add the amount I'd lose by removing the sage, and another says he did this in just one year with a bunch of Spirea.

Saving the Monarchy

On May 7 we received a packet of showy milkweed (Asclepias speciosa) seeds from Red Butte Garden and attended their online class Saving the Monarchy:  On Monarchs & Milkweeds. We soaked the seeds overnight and started them inside May 8 under our grow lights. Next step: germination!

Ancestry Composition across three testing companies

Back in 2012 I posted my Ancestry Composition results from 23andMe. I thought I'd revisit this by comparing my results from 23andMe, Ancestry, and FamilyTreeDNA.

23andMe

European   99.8%

Northwestern European93.2%

British & Irish47.1%

French & German20.6%

Scandinavian6.0%

Broadly Northwestern European19.5%

Southern European4.4%

Iberian1.4%

Broadly Southern European2.9%

Broadly European2.2%

Ancestry

Thousands of years ago

Ethnicity Estimate

Asia

1%

 Low Confidence Region

Europe

99%

Europe West (FR, DE)

47%

Ireland

27%

Great Britain

2%

Iberian Peninsula

8%

 Low Confidence Region

Scandinavia

3%

Europe East

1%

Italy/Greece

1%

FamilyTreeDNA - Karen

European97%

West and Central Europe76% 
British Isles21%

Trace Results 
South Central Asia< 2% 
< 2%

East Europe

FamilyTreeDNA - Karen's full brother Ray

 European95%

  British Isles 85% 

  Iberia6% 

  East Europe4%

  Middle Eastern4%

  Asia Minor4%
 Trace Results 

  Ashkenazi< 1%

 

  Southeast Europe< 1%

 

What I gather here is that we're not particularly good at distinguishing between British Isles and Western Europe.

Pedigrees as art

With another Mizoue family reunion around the corner, I've been thinking about family trees as art. Our family also attended an orientation session with the nifty $30,000 laser cutter available to Boulder Public Library patrons at their BLDG 61 makerspace. Here's a word cloud of my ancestral surnames:

Scaling the branches of our global family tree

Sheesh, I should really blog sometimes...


For the past year or two I've been pretty much obsessed with genealogy. Things really kicked up a notch when I became active on WikiTree in late 2014. I found the idea of collaborative family trees fascinating, and pretty quickly became part of the volunteer leadership there. In February 2015 I headed off to RootsTech with the WikiTree gang for my first genealogy conference, brought my family out to the Global Family Reunion in June, and then returned to RootsTech 2016. This year I'm the new Recording Secretary for the Boulder Genealogical Society at home in Colorado, and am a regular at Colorado Genealogical Society events as well. In May I gave my first presentation, entitled "Plays Well with Others: Pros and Cons of Collaborative Family Trees" to the Boulder group.

While I do work on my own family history quite a bit, I especially enjoy helping others connect. Mostly it's other genealogists like myself, but sometimes we get asked to pitch in and connect better known cousins:

NYC to Fajardo PR to Georgia & back to NYC. Excited to connect @rosariodawson to @ajjacobs and the other @wikitreers https://t.co/KfmkeST4GK

— Karen Tobo (@karentobo) June 16, 2016

As the leader of WikiTree's Puerto Rican Roots project, it was really fun to find a path between these two New Yorkers. I wish I could say I used my powers of deductive reasoning to discern the shortest path between Ms. Dawson and Mr. Jacobs, but I really just used brute force. I added about 150 of Ms. Dawson's cousins and cousins' cousins until I noticed that her great-great-aunt Julia (Alvira y Torres) Garrison Bookman had married a Georgia man Roy Garrison whose colonial ancestor Christopher Garrison was already present on the global family tree.

So yeah. That's how I spend my evenings...

Getting ready for the Global Family Reunion

embeddable family tree updated live from WikiTree

So this fall I learned about the upcoming Global Family Reunion in New York from founder AJ Jacobs' TED talk. I'm totally in. Lately I've been obsessed with a WikiTree game called "Connection Combat," in which researchers race to connect two different people to the family. I've been so successful that I think it's time to take a break and give someone else a chance. :)

Bring on the veggies!

Well, I'm dieting. My grocery cart looks like a rolling farm stand, I'm dehydrating zucchini chips for tonight's Red Cross barbecue, and I haven't raided my officemates' candy jars in 16 days. My favorite part is that my awesome local coffee shop Proper Grounds is steaming my daily protein drink into a mocha. Hooray!

Here's the latest: