Random Wibblings

After last Friday’s visit to the archives, I’m left with a bit of a conundrum. I found a marriage for one of my 4th Great-Grandparents – John Andrews to Martha Clough – at Willoughby in June 1797. So far so good. To add a little confusion into the mix, there was also another marriage on the same page between an Edward Sylvester and another Martha Clough in May of the same year.

Looking through the baptisms, I can only find one baptism for a Martha Clough of the right age. She was baptized in Feb 1779 and, unusually for registers, has a birth recorded of Dec 1778 to a John & Martha Clough. The only other Martha Clough I can find was baptized in 1756 which would make her at least 41 at marriage. Fine were it not for the fact that she had at least 6 children, with the latest I know of being baptized in 1815 by which time she would be 59!

Attacking things from a different angle, I found a will for a John Clough of 1803 and in it he leaves money to, amongst others, his daughter Martha Sylvester, wife of Edward Sylvester. At this point I’m assuming that I’m stuffed – the Martha I’ve found a baptism for is the same one mentioned in the will.

Looking through the burials for the Andrews family I find that Martha Andrews was buried in 1854, aged 75. This gives her an approximate birth year of – guess what? – 1779. Now where do we find a Martha Clough born around 1779…

Now cogs have started whirring. The John Clough will mentions his other children – Mary, John, Ann & James. I can’t find a record for Mary, John was baptized in 1767, Ann in 1772 and James in 1768. All three are to a John Clough and Mary.

In order to sort this out I need to find the following:

If the Martha that has the baptism record is the one that married Edward Sylvester

• Martha Sylvester’s age at burial should point back to around 1778
• John Clough’s wife, Mary, needs to have died
• John Clough needs to have remarried a Martha

For the Martha Andrews case

• No burial for John Clough’s wife, Mary, before the birth date of Martha
• The marriage between John Clough and Martha lists John Clough’s condition as bachelor, not Widower
• John Clough’s will mentions his wife’s name as Mary

Tomorrow (or technically today looking at the clock) should hopefully give some answers…

I added the next batch of fish on Saturday – 6 Cardinal Tetras (Paracheirodon axelrodi). I’ll be adding at least another 6 and possibly a further 6 after that to build up a nice shoal.

Here’s a pic of them from this afternoon:

They’re still quite small in relation to the Blank Phantoms so if they look to be getting harassed I might add the next 6 this coming weekend rather than the next batch of Black Phantoms as I had originally planned.

Now that the fish have been in for a couple of days it looks as if I may actually have a 50:50 split of male to female. The other two are possibly younger and have not yet developed full colouring, but they do appear to have red on the pelvic and adipose fins and the dorsal doesn’t appear to be quite as "tall" as the males.

Its been a busy day today. I have declared the cycle complete so I performed the big water change this morning – somewhere in the region of 80-90%. I also gave the hygrophila difformis a good trim and removed one of the large swords & replaced it with a couple of its child plants.

To start the livestock off, I’ve added six Black Phantom tetras (Hyphessobrycon megalopterus) as the first occupants. I shall increase the shoal to a dozen later, adding another size females as I think I’ve managed to get five males in the first half dozen.

A quick photo of a male & the female. I think the glass needs a clean!

After nigh on three weeks of nitrite dropping by a consistent amount each day, I decided to post on the Practical Fishkeeping forum regarding it not speeding up. The reply on there would suggest that the cycle may well be complete, but I’ve been overdoing the ammonia. I tested at 20:00 this evening and it was just over 0.1ppm and I’ve just done another test and it is somewhere between 0 and 0.1ppm. I’m not adding any ammonia until the nitrite is 0, which it should be in the morning. I’m then going to try with 8ml instead of 10ml.

On Friday I’m planning an experiment where I’m going to add ammonia at the start of the day and then test at 30min – 1hr intervals and record the results. Should be interesting.

The plants in the tank needed a good trim so I went to town yesterday and went from this (unfortunately I got a bad reflection in the pic):

To this:

I’ve removed the vallis from the back right of the tank as it just didn’t look right, and moved the sword that was in the centre to replace it. This has opened up the centre of the tank where all the cryptocorynes are. There is also a nymphaea (I think) bulb just starting to grow there so that should fill it in as well.

I just wish the cycle would finish now. It is processing all the ammonia in 12hrs or less but the nitrite still isn’t down to 0 in 24. It’s currently wavering at 0.6 to 0.1. Here’s hoping for next weekend…

Cycle is almost there now. Nitrite is almost down to 0. Onto the pics:

This is what the tank looked like just over a week ago. It seems to get rather cloudy and went worse than this before the KH drop induced water change.

Luckily the water change & fixing the KH/pH seems to have rectified it as we’re now looking like this. In need of another trim, methinks.

Just for the hell of it, here’s a picture of one of the many, many snails I’ve got in the tank at the moment. They’re doing a good job of keeping the algae down.

The cycle seems to be back on track now. Ammonia is processing 10ml to 0 and nitrite was down to 0.3 last night. Hoping for 0 tonight. KH is stable for the time being after adding the bicarb at the weekend.

After being stable since the water change, the KH has dropped again by 1 dKH and the pH has fallen back to 6.6-6.8. I’ve added 4 tspn of Bicarb to the tank tonight to prop it up, but I’m still looking for the reason.

Annoyingly after my earlier optimism, the nitrite doesn’t seem to be dropping like I thought it should.

Got home yesterday (Monday) and thought the water in the tank felt a bit acidic so I did a pH test and found it had somehow dropped from 7 to at least 6. Followed that up with a KH test and it came back as 0! Something has managed to drop it from 4-5 dKH to 0 in a fortnight. No wonder the pH was low as all the buffering had gone. Tested GH as well and this hasn’t changed from the initial 8-9 degrees. The CO2 drop checker has remained on green throughout.

Did a 50% water change which restored the pH back to 7 & the KH to 2-3 degrees. I was contemplating doing this anyway as the cycle seemed to be stuck on full nitrite for a fortnight and ammonia was zeroing daily, plus the plants needed a good pruning and the CO2 diffuser needed a clean. I saved some of the pre-change tank water for later testing and found, to my surprise, that the ammonia was at 1.2 when it had been zeroing daily. It also looked as if the nitrite had just begun to dip as well, coming in at 0.8-1.6. Retested the tank after the water change & ammonia had been diluted to 0.3-0.6 and nitrite to 0.3-0.8. I decided not to add any further ammonia to make sure it was still being processed.

Got home from work tonight to find that I’d forgotten to turn the timer back on for the CO2 so it hadn’t been running all day. Oops! Tested the tank later on and pH seems to have risen a bit to 7.2-7.4 (which I assume is due to the CO2 that was still in the tank water working itself out during the day), ammonia was 0 and nitrite also 0. Hopefully things are beginning to motor now. I’ve added 8ml of ammonia tonight so we’ll see what the state of play is tomorrow.