In my eternal quest to explore my family history I have recently been focusing my efforts towards researching my own surname ‘Saunders’.

The thing about genealogy is that is soooo addictive and also a task which is never ending, every generation you go back you instantly double the number of lines to follow (2, 4, 8, 16…), this is before you start going back down the tree finding distant cousins! To try and avoid my research taking over my life I have, for now, put the blinkers on to all but the Saunders family - basically following my paternal line.

Putting this surname limit on has actually helped me get further back than I ever imagined, thus far getting back 7 generations back to 1754. I am now keen to try and find other Saunders’ who may share the same ancestors as me. So far all my Saunders ancestors are from the county of Sussex and this is them:

James Saunders (Me!) ->
Philip George Saunders (My Dad!) ->
Frederick William Saunders (Burgess Hill, 1914) ->
George Charles Saunders (Clayton, 1879) ->
William Saunders (Albourne, 1846) ->
John Saunders (Cowfold, 1809) ->
Charles Saunders (Hurstpierpoint, 1783) ->
John Saunders (Twineham, 1754)

I have not yet come across a hint of any massive family fortune due to me - I think many of my older ancestors were part of the poor class, mostly working as labourers on the Sussex farms or as fishermen, but I am still proud of them as an important part of the country keeping the nation fed.

I now want to see if I can make any links with the wider Saunders family across the world. Rather than searching through dusty, illegible and incomplete old documents I am turning to the tools of a 21st Century genealogist… DNA testing with FTDNA and Social Networking on Facebook.

During the last year I have been rather lax writing in, this, my blog. I could make up some elaborate excuse why I have been blog vacant but to be totally honest it is just because my interests were else where… wait, hold on don’t switch off yet! I just want to apologise to my ‘loyal readers’ for deserting them and cutting short their supply of random Jimbo thoughts, rants and revelations. Thinking about it, I actually miss lovingly composing blog entries letting them out into the wild of the wibbly-net and then seeing the responses come back in the comments.

Of late I have been warming to my trusty blog again, and reading other people’s blogs too. I hope to get back into the swing of things again and start churning out some thought provoking posts again. However, as I say above, if I have not lost your loyalty already, I would love to read your feedback and thoughts on any future or previous posts.

Once again, please forgive me!

“You can’t undo anything you’ve already done, but you can face up to it. You can tell the truth. You can seek forgiveness. And then let God do the rest.” –Author Unknown

Over the past 8 months I have really been getting into researching my genealogy. I have, for some time, been interested in my family roots, however recently I have made it my mission to convert all the family photos, documents and certificates into digital PDF format so they can be kept, copied and printed easily for future generations. In doing this I also hope it will prevent the valuable history only being handed down one family line and other decendants missing out - even if the original paper copies go one way, at least digital copies can be duplicated as many times as needed.

I have been struggling getting past a brick wall tracing my ‘Saunders’ paternal line after the paper trail went cold after just 4 generations. Being my own surname I am keen to try and get further back with this surname so I have turned to the genealogical research method of the 21st century - looking into my DNA.

No longer do you have to look in dusty old books or have to decipher unintelligible writing on old documents I have got my Genes tested with Family Tree DNA, based in the USA they host the largest database of Y-Chromosome DNA results categorised by surname, these surnames are then grouped into Projects which you can join and compare others DNA results with similar surnames.

If you are a Saunders, Sanders, Saunderson or Sander I would encourage you to join the Saunders DNA project, the more who join the greater the chances of finding matches.

“I’ve been single-stranded too long! Lonely ATGCATG would like to pair up with congenial TACGTAC” –DNA Joke

As you may have guessed I like reading phenomenon’s, here are a couple more I picked up…

The first is a ‘Nonsense Passage’ which my mum gave me, it is used to test weaknesses in reading possibly as an indication to dyslexia. Apparently it highlights an over-reliance on rote word learning, and a lack of understanding of the regularities of the writing system… whatever that means? Still thought it was interesting:

One day a mib fell into the feg. So gruny was he that he cried, “Ober, give me a throld!” He climbed out, shook the water off and ran back to his dom. She said, “Oh stid,” and gave him a reb lim drack.

The second is really more of a tongue twister, I have yet to say the following whole sentence correctly at a reasonable speed:

One smart fellow, he felt smart.
Two smart fellows, they felt smart.
Three smart fellows, they all felt smart

The poor fellow just ends up smelling bad every time!

“If you are dyslexic, your eyes work fine, your brain works fine, but there is a little short circuit in the wire that goes between the eye and the brain. Reading is not a fluid process.” –Bruce Jenner

This June, me and a bunch of my Virgin Media colleagues will be swapping our keyboards and desks for the great outdoors. We ‘think’ we are fit and therefore have decided to take the challenge to climb 3 of the UK’s tallest mountains, Ben Nevis (1,344m), Scafell Pike (978m) and Snowdon (1,085m). Oh yeah, and we thought we would try and scale these 3 mountains in just 24 hours too!

We are not just doing this to prove to ourselves that we are on top of form, nor just to bag three more trig points, but the primary reason we are doing this is to raise money for charity. Last year the team raised £2375.46 for Great Ormond Street Hospital and Motor Neurone Disease. This year we are combining our efforts with 35 other competing teams to focus all our fundraising efforts for a charity called the Foyer Federation, an organisation which helps homeless young people regain their full potential so they can begin to build a life for themselves. More information about the charity and the event can be found here.

Please sponsor us by visiting our Just Giving Sponsorship Site. Donating through this site is simple, fast and totally secure. It is also the most efficient way to sponsor us. If you are a UK taxpayer, an extra 28% in tax will be added to your gift at no extra cost to you.

Please dig deep - we are climbing 3 mountains in 24 hours after all!

“The balloons only have one life and the only way of finding out whether they work is to attempt to fly around the world.” –Sir Richard Branson

Today is World Autism Awareness Day, a day which aims to challenge us to “think differently about autism”. This remindes me about a blog entry I wanted to write about something that opened my eyes recently after reading a magazine article and watching a collection of online video blogs made by an autistic lady.

I have worked in the past with Autistic Children in a previous job I had as a carer in 2005. In this job I learnt a great deal about the different ways in which we can communicate with Autistic children using picture and coloured cards. I have also seen first hand the frustration that can be experienced by both carer and autistic child when they are unable to communicate because they are almost talking a different ‘language’.

The magazine article in Wired Magazine (March 2008 Issue) posed a couple of thought provoking questions about how autism should not be considered a disease, how we should not have the rite to try and ‘fix’ autism and whether autism should be accepted as another part of ‘the variety of life’. Why should we put down a person for failing to speak our language or conform to our ‘normal’ ways while we fail to try and learn the “native language” of an autistic person?

The article goes on to discuss the problems with traditional intelligence tests written in ‘our language’. In the past many Autistic people were considered to have low I.Q. because they could not understand what was being asked of them. It has recently been realised that quite a number of autistic people have small areas of increased ability (mathematics, memory, problem solving) but these have been undetected due to shortfalls in the methods we use to measure intelligence. We would not consider a blind person as unintelligent just because they are unable to respond to a set of written questions, yet we label autistics as lacking brainpower because they can not express what they know, or in a way we can understand.

Following reading the article I then went on to watch a couple of YouTube videos created by an Autistic lady called Amanda Baggs (aka ’silentmiaow’) showing how she communicates with the world. The first of the videos called ‘In My Language’ started off with a woman rocking back and forth, flapping her hands and chanting an spooky hum, going on to stroke and rub her face on various objects. The video then cuts to a translation describing what is going on inside Amanda’s head as she carries out these seemingly bizarre actions. The second video, ‘Disability Characteristics and Political Correctness’, is a commentary by Amanda describing her past as a child, tortured because she was different and her upset of people now walking on egg-shells around her. What is amazing is how Amanda creates these videos, she does not talk but instead uses a computer synthesized voice, splicing together lots of small video clips. From first impressions you would never have guessed that this lady was capable of creating and publishing such content.

Watching these two videos and reading this article certainly changed the way in which I now look at autism and I really hope that you will also watch these videos and that they too will challenge you to “think differently about autism”.

“If Amanda Baggs had walked into my clinic five years ago, I would have said she had significant cognitive impairment. And I would have been wrong.” –Thomas Zeffiro, Neuroscientist