Last Day of the Class on Family Tree Maker.

 Family Tree Maker 2019 v. 24.1 is the program that runs my family tree on my home computer. There are some advanced features I need to learn today, the last day of the class. So far, I've learned things that I didn't think were possible -- because the new version has features that weren't available on earlier versions.

Friday was my birthday, and the class was my present - in advance - from Goldibear. It is surprising to me to discover I can still learn complicated new things at 77 years old. Monday this Pandababy blog will resume daily postings on genealogy and on our family tree.

Pandababy Blog in 2023 will, I hope, be able to present interesting stories out of the 5,000 people in my tree. Some examples are the Quakers who fled to the wilderness that was New Jersey in the 1600s, to have freedom of religion; the Germans who came to America in 1750, and joined the battle for Independence in 1776; The Finnish ancestors who came in 1912, when Finland was under the boot heel of its neighbor Russia: these are just a few of the stories I want to tell in the coming year.

The old saying that history repeats itself is embodied in my family tree. My grandparents left Finland because they wanted the freedom to speak, read and write in their native tongue, Finnish. Russia was doing in Finland then what it is doing in Ukraine now - making people teach school in Russian, giving preference to Russians for government jobs, drafting the young men into the Russian army -- all the same and much more. My family tree is a living example of the indomitable human spirit that cries out in all of us for the dignity of freedom of expression, of religion, of autonomy.

From the Magna Carta Surety Barons of 1215, to the signers of the Declaration of Independence of 1776, my ancestors have embraced the causes embodied in the Constitution of the United States.