2016 had much sadness sprinkled with joy. On the sad side it saw the loss of Kitty's Dad, and the death of our dog Navajo.

On the bright side were Kitty's visits to her grandson, her nephew Chase getting married in a beautiful ceremony in Colorado, and the welcoming of a new dog into our household.

Two funerals and a wedding

Kitty's Dad was 96 when he passed away of pneumonia on Easter Sunday this past March. A blessed day for a wonderful human being to leave us. Click here for my blog post about his life.

We laid Dad to rest on his wife's birthday in April at the memorial garden in East Hampton. We had a service at St. Luke's which included talks by Kitty and Shipley as well as an honor guard which played taps and presented Kitty with a folded flag. Click here for the eulogies on my family history site. Several wonderful cousins made the trip along with children and grandchildren. We held the reception at the Maidstone club afterwards which brought back many memories.

Kitty and her Beyer cousins traveled to Wolfboro, NH to bury Kitty's Aunt Trudi next to her husband, brother-in-law, and parents this past August on her birthday. She died last year on Christmas eve. Click here for her page on the family history site. Another special death day for a special person.

The Wolfboro summer home of Kitty's Thannhauser grandparents is now owned by Trudi's sister, Kitty's Aunt Stasi and her children who were happy to let us use the house for this occasion. The property has many memories for us older cousins who summered there in the 1950s.

The very beautiful outdoor wedding of Kitty's nephew Chase Munson and Tay Wiles took place in September at Paeonia, Colorado, the home of High Country News (HCN), where Tay works and reports. Click here for a selection of her articles.

They now live in Oakland, CA and Tay is still an associate editor for HCN; Chase works for AirBNB.

The picture on the left shows Chase waiting nervously for his bride to appear with his Munson family flanking him - brother Joe, nephew Quil, sister Nicki, sister Leah, brother Geddes, mother Erika, dad Shipley. All of them, as well as Tay's family, participated in the ceremony with a reading (telling the story of the bridal couple who first met in ninth grade English class).

Our Dogs

We lost our difficult doggie Navajo to a horrible cancer, hemangiosarcoma, the same one which killed Steve's first dog, Amica. Navajo had become quite sweet in her old age. We miss her.

Navajo did not like other dogs, so after she passed we were without a dog for several months. Steve has a theory that a dog would come up to us and say, "Hi I'm your dog." One day Kitty opened up her Facebook app and an adorable dog, a three year old lab mutt, appeared there looking for a new home because her person was moving to an apartment where dogs are not allowed. She is now ours.

Health

Steve continues to hold his prostate cancer at bay. He completed the control side of a trial and expects to be in the experimental side soon (this a not a double blind placebo trial because it is only a new protocol, not a new drug).

His M.D. Anderson doctor promised that he would not die of the disease, and Steve sought to motivate him by observing that if the doctor was wrong we would be entitled to a refund.

On Steve's last visit to Houston, Kitty accompanied him on the train, the Sunset Limited, as she had always wanted to try an overnight train. The "roomette" was a bit cramped for a two day trip but it improved for Kitty once Steve took the top bunk. Next time, if there is one, we will take a larger space, a "room."

Travels

Other travels this year were mainly for bridge tournaments including a trip to Oregon where we drove slowly up the coast, stopping at the Getty Villa, visiting friends in Ventura, and staying in Big Sur for a few nights.

On the way North, Kitty visited with her second cousin once removed, Marlys, near Medford, Oregon, collecting her Wold line DNA and many stories and pictures. Ed, another Wold side cousin joined us.(Yes Cindy H., next time I will include you, now that I know you live there too!)

We stayed a few days with first cousin Marty (Trudi's daughter) at her daughter Laura and husband Kent's house in Portland, getting to know their children Lyla and Koen and going to gardens and garden sales. Oh those beautiful rhododendrons!

We played in a tournament in Bend, Oregon, where Mimi, a high school classmate of Kitty's, lives. She is also into genealogy. Click here for her blog on famly mysteries. They had a lovely lunch there and again at the Jamboree, a genealogy conference in Burbank where Kitty speaks every year.

Genetic Genealogy

Kitty's retirement hobby has become a passionate career. She now does online coaching via Google Hangouts to teach others how to use DNA for genealogy as well giving many presentations at conferences and local societies. She moved up to seventh on the list of rockstar genetic genealogists in the yearly online poll.

Also this year Kitty took on a few DNA searches for adoption cases and had one major success, helping find the family for an Ashkenazi adoptee. Jewish adoptees are very very difficult to help due to endogamy and so few deep family trees. It turned out that his mother was 16 when she gave him up. She married his father a few years later and they had been married for 64 years at the time of her death last year. Now he has found his biological father and two full siblings, a brother and a sister. His sister had been looking for him for the past 38 years. He will meet them all in January. DNA testing was the key.

Genealogy

Shipley, Kitty's brother got to go to the yearly IAJGS conference which was in Seattle this year (Israel last year) and received Kitty's award for her many years of volunteering for them online. He also met our German second cousins when he visited Munich whom Kitty found online serendipitously - click here to read all about that.

Kitty's best Christmas present ever from Steve was the Etnesoga, a set of local history books from Etne, Hordaland, Norway. Known as Bygdebuk, these tomes have details on every farm and every family who lived there, an invaluable resource for a genealogist.

Visitors

We now know what to do when we need rain here, invite Margie Gwozdzinsky to visit! She claims it has never been sunny for her in San Diego. My garden is very grateful. On her way to a Mexico cruise she came for a few days to stay with us. She loved our house and garden which she felt she had gotten to know over the years by reading these letters and seeing the pictures. Since I was barred from taking her picture, that is the edge of her red jacket and her hand in Balboa Park!

When you live far from family it is good to have friends, Thanksgiving dinner with neighbors Eileen and John Neumeister.

Technology

Kitty fell in love with an app on her Android, INSTAGRAM, because she can easily and quickly edit photos, reframe, brighten, etc., and then upload them to Facebook and elsewhere. Most of the pictures in this newsletter are linked to their larger versions on Instagram where there are more pictures from the same events. This link will get you to Kitty's latest photos without you needing to log in anywhere: https://www.instagram.com/kittymcooper/

Bridge

The less said about our bridge performance this year this better. We only went (unsuccessfully) to one Nationals and hardly won any regionals. At least we won a KO teams at our favorite regional in Ventura with good friend Lynne Feldman as well as Markland Jones and his brother-in-law Rick Gold.