Broken but not Beaten
As I’m writing this, I’m reminded of the Thompson family motto, Fracta Non Victa which google translates into “broken down, it was overcome” but I’ve generally taken to mean “broken not beaten”.
A lot of things have happened since I pretty much abandoned social media, fell behind in email forums, added job duties (becoming a manager where I work) and started going back to school to get my Bachelor’s degree. Not the least of which was the fact that I lost this website.
Apparently, in April, I let my hosting lapse and my site was deleted. While I’ve done my best to restore the content from backups in March, not everything has restored nicely. For instance, there are many broken references and cross-links in my pages and quite a few missing images. All of those things make it a bit harder to move around quickly to related items and sometimes harm the context of my posts. It’s especially painful because a lot of these images represent points in time and things will have changed in the years that followed the original posting.
I’m now going through post by post to try to restore images where I can or find/make new ones to take the missing images place. I intend to follow that up with a campaign of link fixing.
Things I should have posted about
- I’m hoping to get caught up with new information from the Cumberland Cluster R-DF95 Baker family who have run through big Y testing and feature as mystery Bakers in previous posts.
- I’ve ordered big Y for myself so I can join the other Elmers and Elmores in that arena and get notified if/when new matches roll in.
- I’ve ordered big Y for the U152 Thompsons to find their place in the Y family tree compared to other Ulster Irish U152 families.
- Ancestry Thru Lines has illuminated a lot of possible matches in my genetic family tree.
- I’ve connected with some possible Irish Aylmer testers from the U.K.
- I want to take a critical look at the data I have on James Walsworth Elmore.
- I’ve had some interesting contact with my aunt Cheryl’s Roberts family.
- …and I finally jumped in on MTDNA to see where that leads me on identifying my all mother.
I’m hopeful that I can get this ship back in shape (with better backups) and set some time aside to write about the things that have been rolling around in my brain all year. I’ll just need to balance that out with the 12-page paper I have due.
On a side note regarding the crest image on this post: Since I found out that my branch of the Thompsons are Elmores, I’ve wanted to “difference” the somewhat universally bestowed Thompson family crest with the cornish choughs (members of the crow family) of the Elmers rather than the normal Thompson hawks. Differencing is sometimes done by Scottish clans to denote differences in relationships between people or septs. I’ve often thought that swapping out the birds in our crests would be a fun way to visually bridge the identity gap.
I should point out that heraldry is not universal and these things usually belong to a single person or maybe their family. There are rules and governing bodies and the description of the image is more important than the image itself. It is not for upstarts from the colonies to decide what is on a crest.
I’m going to switch my hawks for crows and call this forgery mine anyway.