Thursday, August 18, 2011

Low-Fat Diet - Probably Not What They Intended

So, yes, apparently I have a gall bladder. Most of us do, and probably most of us have as little clue about it as I did, until mine started to complain.

The short version of the story is that I'm on a low-fat diet - specifically, 20% of calories from fat - for at least a month. Since food and nutrition are enthusiasms of mine already, this has led to some interesting number-crunching.

Here's a typical Saturday night dinner at our house, of steak and potatoes, and a vegetable cooked in a little olive oil and garlic. We cook pretty healthy already, and my analysis says it would be 30% calories from fat, which is a healthy amount according to the Heart and Stroke Foundation.
Food Serving Calories Quantity Total
Fat grams
Beef, lean (round, loin, flank) 2.5 ounces 135 2 270
12
Potato 1/2 cup 68 2 136
0
Broccoli, raw 1/2 cup 15 2 30
0
Vegetable and olive oil 1 teaspoon 40 1 40
4.5
% calories from fat: 31%





Now, here's the way I think I'm probably not supposed to reduce it to 20% calories from fat. I've added just one new line:
Food Serving Calories Quantity Total
Fat grams
Beef, lean (round, loin, flank) 2.5 ounces 135 2 270
12
Potato 1/2 cup 68 2 136
0
Broccoli, raw 1/2 cup 15 2 30
0
Vegetable and olive oil 1 teaspoon 40 1 40
4.5
Wine 4 ounces 97 3 290.4
0
% calories from fat: 19%





That's right, drinking half a bottle of wine fixes the problem!

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Virtual Travel

I love how Google Maps lets you travel virtually, seeing how childhood places have changed.

My father helped his father built this house, in 1953 when he was 12. I have many happy memories of visiting here.


Wednesday, August 3, 2011

1911 continued - Maternal side

Here we have the little Bailey family. There's husband George, his second wife Ella, and his children Annie and Everett (my great-grandfather). Annie went on to marry Floyd Massender and have ten children, and Everett married Lola Laverne Griffin and had nine children. The 19 cousins and their descendants still have a reunion every summer. In 1911 they're living in Mersea, in Essex County.

Nearby, in Colchester North, George's mother Eliza Bailey is living with another of her sons, Joseph, and his growing family. She is 69 but lived to be 86, so I imagine her enjoying the company of little Ruby, Frederick, and Orville (whose middle name was Fair, her maiden name).

George's first father-in-law, who is of course my three-times-great-grandfather, lives in the very next household.

Moving on to the Griffin branch, we have the perfect example of why families are hard to find in the census. I finally found them spelled Griffen, with the husband's birthdate 20 years off from what I had been told! They are in Essex North county, in a settlement called Rochester that appears to no longer exist. The family consists of Alfred, his wife Louisa, and children Curell, Almer, Wesley, and Laverne. This poor eldest child of theirs is listed in 1891 as a 7-year-old girl named Coral, in 1901 as a 16-year-old son named Carell, and finally in 1911 as a 25-year-old son named Curell.

Also in Mersea we have Louia's mother, Anne Shelson, living with her daughter Attillia, her husband, and their three daughters.

Over in Gosfield North we get my mother's mother's foster family. Henry Carder is a ripe old 88, despite the fact that his wife Sarah died in the previous year at the age of 64. Henry is living with his son Edwin, and his wife Ella, and they have sons Albert and Orville; my grandmother did not join their family until the early 1920s. It will be interesting to see if she is in the 1921 census when it is released in 2013. In this snippet we also get a tantalizing idea of their address - "N.W. ? 25 con 8".

Minor Genealogy Mystery Solved

I mentioned in my last post that I had a couple of women I was trying to track down in the 1911 census. One is Sarah McFarlin, born April 12, 1838 on the lovely island of Islay, Scotland. I don't know when she emigrated, but it was before she was married, with her parents Neal and Flora McFarlin. Sarah married Benjamin Franklin Woodard (a popular name in 1841 when he was born) on August 14, 1860 somewhere in the Simcoe district.

Franklin and Sarah lived in the town of Stayner, and are found there in the 1881 and 1891 census. Franklin lists his occupation as "Labourer" in 1881, and his racial origin as German. They had a big family of 9 children, one baby every two years, like clockwork. I don't know when Franklin died, but Sarah is listed as a widow in the 1901 census, living with her daughter Rachel in Collingwood.It took me a while to find Sarah in the 1911 census, since in the transcription her last name is listed as "McDonald" (it is not given at all in the actual record), and her birth year has magically shifted to 1840. I think things like that happened in the census recording when someone in the household listed everyone, and the exact dates weren't seen as that important. (It sure annoys family history hunters, though). It didn't help that Rachel's name is recorded as Raphael, either, and that she's on the previous page. However, I finally found Sarah, 71 years of age and living with her daughter and family, including two teenage granddaughters and a four-year-old grandson. She died later that year and is buried in the Stayner Union cemetery.

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Genealogy and 1911 census

Here's an enthusiasm I haven't touched on yet... family history!

This evening I have the urge to check out automatedgenealogy.com's 1911 census records and see if there's anyone I've missed.

Here's my grandfather Nelson with his parents and siblings, in Evanturel Township, Nipissing. A little hard to read, isn't it? That's why the website is so great. We've got James (shortened to Jas) age 58, his wife Christine age 40, and their children Annie (14), Aubrey (12), Laura (9), and Stella (7). Mary someone was a lodger.

Here's the Woodard family, consisting of my grandmother and her parents and siblings in the town of Stayner. Angus (46) and his wife Sarah E (41), with their four daughters and son. My grandmother is Lula, currently age 5.

I actually have a picture of them just a couple of years earlier (that's Grandma in the lower right).

That's all I have so far from my Dad's side of the family. There are a couple of loose ends to tie up - there are a couple of women who died in 1911 or 1912, and I've like to find them in the census, but so far haven't had any luck. The last names are Woodard and Garrod, which are two that have given me a hard time in terms of variant spelling.