Friday, December 19, 2008

Moving Day

We spent yesterday evening and all day today helping our youngest daughter and her fiance set up their new home - a lovely Terrace Home. Along with them are their dog and rabbit and a brand new dog just coming home tonight. I spent the day cleaning and then putting together small tables, shelves and the like. Amazingly by this evening my husband and son in law to be had all the curtains up and the main floor was in really good shape. The upstairs too is coming along nicely. Another week and they will be settled right in.

Work on genealogy was on the back burner for the most part but made one amazing discovery. I had a query from one of the ancestry subscribers about Henry May (husband of my 2x great grandmother's sister)'s wife Sarah. They were looking for a maiden name. I provided that and just chanced to check the International Genealogical Index probably for the 30th time or more and there it was online finally - their marriage registration in the parish records for St Nicholas, Bristol, Gloucester, England. Possibly I simply hadn't looked at the Bristol entry thinking it was too far away but having traveled those roads now last spring I have a better feel for how far people might travel from their native location even just for a wedding. Consequently I was able to supply that extra interesting detail as well to assist them in their search backwards in their own family line.

A second query from ancestry was most interesting as it is about my tenth query about a Charles Blake. Some give his father as Thomas Blake (b 1685, Andover Hampshire) but I have the parish registers for his marriage and the baptism of his only child listed at Andover who happens to be my 5x great grandfather. Thomas was buried in 1714 (married in 1708, only son in 1709) and the possible births for this Charles are around 1710 to 1715. I do have an interesting will that lists all of these people which I generally tell people about and give them the section that is pertinent to them. I suggested that it would be great if they had a Blake descendant if they would test their y-DNA since I have the results for my brothers.

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