Find My Past Free days

I made good use of the four Find My Past free days. I subscribe to Find My Past but did not subscribe to the 1911 census. I hadn't really thought I would use it a great deal. However, I spent all of the free time on the 1911 census and have now collected all the Siderfin entries and quite a few Pincombe entries for my two one name studies. I also spent time that I was going to put in when we go to England later this year on my families trying to sort out my Taylor line (my maternal grandmother's mother) at Birmingham and collecting the census information for my paternal grandfather's siblings, my paternal grandmother's half-siblings and my great grandparents information as a number of them were still alive for the 1911 census.

Thank you to Find My Past for making this information available. I had planned on spending some time on the census at Kew but will now concentrate on wills. That will be the method by which I sort out the Blake families of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. My line seems correct but a little more support for the link from William (baptized 1615 at Andover to John baptized 1649 at Andover to Thomas baptized 1685 at Andover would be great. A little family lore plus the parish registers has been my source thus far but a little more is always appreciated.

On our first day of arrival in England we are thinking of taking a bus tour where we could sleep for a bit until we arrive at our destination, we could have our luggage on the bus as well and then sleep a bit again as we move on to our next destination. That way we would not waste our first day in London sleeping. I had thought about booking a room for the evening before we arrive so that we could go and sleep for a bit there but this other idea seems quite reasonable as well and we are investigating it. The last time we went I slept on the train that we took from Waterloo Station to Dorchester Dorset and that was quite reasonable and left me fortified to attend a family dinner that night!

Probably we will go to Kew on a Tuesday and I shall spend my time looking at the wills for the Blake family - there are about 200 of them that interest me. I already own about 150 wills that I have purchased for my many family lines in England but to purchase 200 Blake without knowing any relationship seems like a poor idea since I am retired and my genealogy money only stretches so far.

Plans are slowly getting put together for our six full days in London before our tour begins. We will travel to the European continent this time and travel through Belgium to Germany and then to Switzerland on to Austria and then into Italy and up to France. I have been to Italy before spending a week in Rome where we stayed just about 0.5 km from the Vatican. What an excellent week we had (my eldest daughter and I) and we saw a great deal of Rome and the Vatican.

After collecting the Siderfin family from the 1911 census I was searching the web and discovered that the book by Sanders on the Siderfin family is now available on Google books. I was reading through the pages and noted that the Question family was mentioned and it is awhile since I had read the book and in that time period I discovered (because of an individual reading my blog and sending me a will) that Elizabeth Question married Robert Siderfin. I then put together the information from the book and Mary Coffin married to Quirk were the parents of Mary Quirke married to Alice Quirke married to John Question (brother of Elizabeth above), Walter Siderfin, and Isott Quirke married to John Quirke (cousin perhaps). There were a number of land transfers mentioning Mary Quirke and her daughters and I have now put this family together in my Legacy Chart. I had earlier noted the relationship between Mary Quirk and that she married John Question but I had not linked her to my new Question family material. It helps to understand all of these families when you see the linkages. Eventually it would be nice to discover all of the wives maiden names that married into the Siderfin family. Interestingly Jone Question (aunt to Elizabeth Question) married Nicholas Blake who was a son of Humphrey Blake. This Humphrey Blake is reputed to be descended from the Blake family at Calne (my Blake line descends from this Calne Blake family). A small world after all and I had not thought to find my parents had any common ancestry and certainly this is a collateral match only.