Monthly Archives: August 2024

A Park In The Sky

29 Thursday Aug 2024

Posted by in Opinion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , ,

Last week we visited the St. Thomas Elevated Park, in St Thomas, Ontario. Essentially it’s an old railway bridge that has not only been refurbished as a pathway, but it’s also an outdoor art gallery. What a great thing to do with a massive bit of railway infrastructure that’s no longer needed for it’s original purpose.

Of course it’s been done before, with New York’s High Line snaking through that metropolis, but this little bit of modern reuse is much smaller and much more intimate, and a touch easier to get to for us!

The Elevated Park is a walk along the bed of part of the old Michigan Central Railroad that ran between Buffalo, N.Y., and Detroit, Michigan, through southern Ontario. St Thomas, the Railway City, was about the midway point of the line and served as a major centre for the railroad. The walk stretches a couple of kilometres, east-west, out to the western side of the city, but the key part is the bridge that spans Kettle Creek. The bridge that stands today dates to 1929, was a double tracked structure and stands ninety feet above the river below. It’s been paved, and equipped with unobtrusive modern safety fencing, which doesn’t alter the look of the bridge, and among the benches placed there is artwork by local artists. The whole pathway has been created with public donations and private sponsorship, and is free for anyone to use. I note from the Park’s website that they will take donations any time, so I’ll be sending then a few dollars, I think.

The view from the bridge is spectacular, and dizzying if you look down, albeit that you do look right into the yards of a few houses in the valley. Looking down to the top of the tree canopy is always a joy, and you can do that from ninety feet up. It was very warm when we visited, and while the lead up to the bridge is shady, out on the structure it was a wee bit too exposed to linger without getting sunburned. Not great at the time, for sure, but it does mean that we’ll head back in the cooler weather, and maybe walk a couple of kilometres of the track bed beyond the bridge.

This, of course, ties in with the Grandson’s current obsession with trains. He wasn’t with us on the visit, but I’m not sure we’d have been there at all had we’d not taken him a couple of months ago to visit the Elgin County Railway Museum in the centre of the city, from where trains would have departed to cross the bridge we were enjoying as a park.

Anyway, if you’re ever in the area, I can recommend a visit.

Family Trees

27 Tuesday Aug 2024

Posted by in Opinion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

At the outset, let me say that I’m a huge fan of Ancestry.ca (or .com, or .co.uk). The software and it’s underlying data has its detractors, not least because it’s very expensive, but it’s enabled me, and countless thousands of others, to document our families in ways that were simply not possible even just twenty years ago. I’ve met distant cousins, visited graves that I didn’t know existed, and even had them analyze my DNA, so I think the whole thing really is the Bees Knees.

But here’s the “but”.

Because the data entry isn’t controlled, the range and format of what people enter is never ending. All capital letters, no capital letters, abbreviations, codes, misuse of fields, it’s all there. I know it’s true that if you give fifty people a form to fill, it’ll be filled in fifty different ways, so I guess this is something similar. But what, you may ask, does it matter?

Well, it matters a lot. I don’t know if some of the users of Ancestry realise that other people get to see the data they enter; that’s rather the point of Ancestry, that we share information. But including a person’s nickname in the Name field helps no one, and like many of the other data input issues, really screws up sorting and searching. That the nickname is often accompanied by quotation marks or parentheses just adds to the confusion.

Then there are the people who invent their own coded method of data entry, including mothers’ names and spouses names in a person’s First Name and Surname fields not only confuses the database and makes reading the data hard, it’s all unnecessary because these nuggets of information are held elsewhere and linked by the system.

Perhaps what I’m really complaining about is having to go through and re-enter data when it pops up in my family tree, not just to keep it consistent and workable, but to make it look reasonable.

Anyway, nothing will change and I’ll spend a good proportion of my time righting wrongs, in data entry at least. In between times I can happily discover 164 people in my tree who were born in Newfoundland (a week ago I hadn’t heard of any), and realise that a long-lost cousin lived two streets away from where I lived in North London, albeit twenty years earlier. It’s nothing if not interesting in the world of Ancestry.

Things to be grateful for…

13 Tuesday Aug 2024

Posted by in Opinion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

Yesterday we went to the flag raising ceremony that marks the start of the local Pride Week, at the Civic Centre. I’m grateful that we have a sympathetic and caring Municipal administration that supports these things, and I’m grateful that the Council, the Fire Department and the Police were all there in support. In a town that can be deeply religious, it’s good to see that Pride Week is seen as positive.

We walked on down to Turns and Tales, a café and bookshop which is a friendly space for all minorities. I’m grateful that such a space exists, and absolutely loved to see the events night schedule that included many curious things, including a Bridgerton Trivia Night; who knew that was a thing? While we were enjoying our lunch, we watched the people on King Street, the town’s main street, and ruminated on the idea that it should be pedestrianized. The shopping has been killed off by the out of town stores and strip malls, but the space is slowly being taken up by cafés and restaurants, and we thought how much nicer it would be to be car-free. Then we watched a youngish woman rifling through the bins in an alley. She had picked up a discarded cigarette butt, but she appeared to be mostly picking up plastic and padded envelopes. She didn’t look like she lived on the street, although she likely did, but she was either high on something, or mentally ill. I’m grateful that no one I know is suffering from mental illness, at least not to that extent, or lost to drugs and homelessness, because I can’t imagine how awful that could be. I’m grateful that my parents imbued me with sufficient common sense and a sense of how to survive. We should, all of us, be doing more to help those who are not so fortunate, and we should be pressuring those in charge to adjust their priorities so that official help can be available. It’s frustrating to hear just this morning about the movement to prevent our City Council from trying to get an affordable housing scheme running, on the grounds that they’ll need tax payer’s money to do it, but I’m grateful that the City is trying something.

I’m grateful that I live in a comfortable home, with people I love, and that I really want for nothing. Certainly, a lifetime of mostly good decisions, and a big slice of luck, has brought us to where we are, but I’m still grateful.

I’m not a believer in a god, or a higher authority, but it does me the power of good to sit and reflect sometimes, on life in general and how lucky we are to be here. Have you tried it?