Riverbend Journal

  Note, all these photos were taken about ten days ago. We have a series of guests that will be staying with us for a few weeks of July and with everyone home, our only spare bedroom is the Murphy bed in my office which means my time spent on my desktop, where I primarily blog from, will be limited. Thus I am writing a number of posts ahead of time just to keep things going. I can comment from my iPad in a pinch which short responses but I wouldn't want to try to compose a blog post using the same way. Above was the state of our sweetcorn patch, planted far later than I have ever planted it. It is in need of mulching which I hope to do some cool morning in the near future. But it looks good and if things go right, we should have some home grown sweet corn near the end of August. I expect we'll have eaten plenty of other sweetcorn also grown and sold locally before them. A friend of ours brought us a flat of eggplant so we stuck that in the ground. This is the Japanese kind whic

  In case you noticed my absence in commenting or responding to comments on this blog, it was because I was off again on a road trip. Our eldest had freshman orientation at her college and so we all headed up to attend that. We got there a bit early and so headed off to find her dorm for the year which we located and you can see in the above picture.  After that, we attended seminars all morning on everything from adapting to paying tuition. Our college aged children were separated from us and the parents attended more tailored seminars that we could chose from a list. Nothing terrible exciting in all of those. Perhaps the only thing that changed for me is that my romantic notion of someday attending college again is now permanently squashed. Sitting in the seats of large auditoriums with someone droning on and on about something in a far to perky voice just didn't bring back the good memories.  One positive is that after we were reunited, our eldest said she was just a big nerd. A

  As I put together facts in chronological order, I find myself in unfamiliar terrain. Knowing the terrain is useful information when you are dealing with multiple families of the same surname. If a family spends their life in roughly one location but has one outlier, it is wise to scrutinize the outlier for authenticity. My Chicken family origins begin in Durham County, England along the North Sea, a place wholly unfamiliar to me. So I found a period map of the time and started plotting various milestones along it to see if everything looked plausible. My 5th great grandfather John Chicken was born in Durham City which is located at point A on the map above. He marries my 5th great grandmother Ann Hutton Chicken at St. Andrew Auckland, point B above, but she gives birth to two sons, my 4th great grandfather Joseph Chicken and John Chicken 1 (more on the 1 later) back at point A. It is also at point A where Ann Hutton Chicken dies two years after the birth of John and when he dies a fe