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just bizarre

A few days ago we started receiving junk e-mail...from ourselves. Yes, our own personal e-mail account was sending us spam. I ran our anti-virus software and double checked to make sure all the updates and been installed (they had) and nothing showed. The next morning, same thing. So I went to the e-mail help section, found out many people have this problem, downloaded the company software to check for malware, which took all day to run, found nothing...same thing.

So this morning I go to google, found a forum in our e-mail's software where a university professor shared some info, as well as many links to four different types of virus checks his university (Stanford) offered to students. They also had a 30 day trial version that people can run just to check and see what is on the computer. It found two pieces of malware. It quarantined them instead of removing them. So now I'm wondering what will happen when the trial version ends. Does the quarantine end as well?

Equally bizarre, though in a totally different vein, is ancestry.com.  A few years ago Bobby and I did a DNA test. He knew/knows his family history back almost 200 years, and everything he'd been told and researched held to be true. No surprises. Me, on the other hand, was a very different story. Unlike him, my family knew very little about our maternal line (my grandfather said there was no point in learning about skeletons in the hospital and would never answer any questions at all, other than he royally disliked his step-mom). My Dad's side of the family knew their history back to a certain point, and supposedly my great-grandmother was full blooded Creek and her my great-grandfather was half Cherokee. According to my DNA tests, that is not the case. At all.  So I tested my parents. Nada.

An online search suggested you download your raw data from ancestry and submit it to gedmatch.com for a more detailed breakdown of what each gene sample revealed. That revealed small traces of AmericanIndian, but not much. Certainly not a 1/16th (for me) or 1/8 (my Dad) that we had always been told.

So I'm researching, trying to find out as much as I can about the family line. I've found a lot that makes me laugh, some that makes me sigh, some that makes my husband exclaim "You scallowag!" I'd like to learn all I can before my subscription to ancestry.com ends. I've spent enough time the last few weeks to get thoroughly confused (do you know how many Ellen Smiths lived in Alabama in the 1880s?). Hopefully the rest of this week I can get all my notes organized and by next week be back on track and focused on one branch at a time.

Until then, I'm hoping there will not be anymore e-mails from myself.

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