This has been a good year! We have both enjoyed health and happiness. We have been able to get together as a family for the main family holidays. At Thanksgiving we gathered at Blaine and Nina's house for Thanksgiving dinner, and I paused for a moment to reflect upon our blessings. Nina arranged with a next door neighbor to accompany us to the park across the street, where we had new family photos taken. These were needed as we had acquired two more grandchildren and a daughter-in-law since the last group photo. It has been wonderful to have Karin join our family. We really appreciate her good humor and ability to make the right things happen. She and James will be finishing their studies soon, and are moving into their own new home. Rob's employer has gone out of business and he is looking for a new job, and arranging for the publication of his novel. Blaine is working, while recuperating from a work injury to his foot. Chris is in change of the Christmas concert in the school where he is teaching, while Laurel and the rest of the family seem to be doing well. Evelyn is studying for her Early Childhood Eduation degree, while Ed is trying to get into an apprenticeship with his employer. Andrew is doing engineering for an employer now, but still has his own company. He and Nicole are expecting a baby this spring. The little ones are growing like flowers! It is a thrill to see them learn and grow. We are so blessed! We are remodeling our basement. We tore out the old computer room, (seldom used since all of the kids have moved out on their own), and are nearly finished putting in a family room. This will be a nice place where the grandchildren can play during family visits. At one spot I could see evidence of three different positions of the same wall, evidence of how the basement has changed over the past 30 years! The new room will have laminate flooring and off-white colored walls. I plan to add a third light fixture to brighten it up even more. My biggest use of time is family history. I really enjoy the group I work with in FamilySearch Support. There are 12 of us in my group: most of us come from Alberta, but we have members from BC, Colorado, Alaska and Virginia. Besides my work for FamilySearch.org I continue to work on my own family history. And for the last two days I have been doing some research for an elderly friend. One big project involved going through all of my contributions that ended up in the New FamilySearch database. It took many many hours going through this database combining duplicate records, updating records, deleting records, and so forth. It is now about as good as I can make it. In September my website at billbuchanan.clawz.com disappeared, and all attempts to contact the hosting company failed. So I needed to find a new web host. After a search on Google and some comparison, I settled on byethost.com where my site is hosted at billbuchanan.co.cc (short and easy to remember). I have uploaded by family history database there as one large database, which is much easier than tripod.com and clawz.com where I had to break it down into smaller databases. So losing my site at clawz.com may be a blessing in disguise. For my Buchanan genealogy group, I intended to create a 2008 version of the Buchanan Family Tree book, adding some updates from last year. Instead I decided to do an ancestry book on Anselan O'Kyan (Annselan O' Cahan in Irish). Why? Two of my Buchanan cousins did Y-DNA tests. We were told that we were of a "typical chiefly line of clan Buchanan", and all of these chiefs claimed descent from Anselan O'Kyan, son of King Dermond O' Cahan who reigned in northern Ireland. So I decided to capitalize on the whole concept of Y-DNA research, which was to fly over the brick walls that block our paper research. I already had a file of Anselan's ancestry, which was sent to me by Mary Slawson, the head of the Human Family Project. Now I needed to put it into the form of a book. It was an interesting little project. We are all descended from peasants and kings, and I have enjoyed the history, legend, and myth of our very early ancestry on Anselan's line. I have also enjoyed email messages, letters and phone calls from various people who have contacted me regarding family history. It has been a wonderful year! Best wishes for a wonderful Christmas! I pause to feel the power of the angel's words of "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men." We always seem to need more peace and more good will! And somehow at this season of the year there is a little more of both.