Thursday, September 29, 2011

Gray family at Cherry Burton and continuing with the Blake Free BMD project

Although I started my blog purely as a diary for myself, I love it that people comment on my blog postings. I heard today from a descendant of the Gray family at Cherry Burton. My Robert Gray Junior came to Canada between 1832 and 1835. I do not have his exact date of arrival but I know he was still farming in Etton in the summer of 1832 so he could have come in the Fall of 1832 or by the Spring of 1835 as he and Mary Routledge are married and their first child is born 9 Feb 1836. It is highly likely that Robert Gray has come to London Township in Middlesex County Ontario because of Thomas Carling who is descended from the Carling family who were brewers at Etton in this time period. Thomas was the only child of this family to emigrate and likewise only William Gray and Robert Gray Junior came to Canada initially although they were later joined by their youngest brother James. The other brothers and sisters remained in England (and primarily in the East Riding of Yorkshire). I suspect that he arrived in late 1832 but still no actual paperwork to prove that (I also have that opinion from my fourth cousin George DeKay who has researched his Gray line and published it).

I continue working on the Blake marriages in Free BMD. As I work away gradually evolving in my mind is the schematic for displaying this information once I have captured all of it. I now know that I will use the Registration Districts to display the information. That way I get around the problem of Registration Districts overlapping County lines. In my mapping though I shall  have to find a map with Registration Districts as they were in the decade that I am demonstrating. That should be fairly straightforward. I can then colour them in by density much like the Profiler for British Surnames has done. Although not quite as sophisticated as my programming skills are somewhat limited (and becoming more so as new generations of programming are introduced).

I also want to work on some of the Pincombe wills that I have not yet transcribed. This project once begun has proven to be quite valuable to me and they are also linked to by the Devon Genuki website giving them fantastic usability. It is this visual that is prompting me to complete the task of transcribing every Pincombe will that I possess. I hope over time that my work on Pincombe will encourage people to test for the yDNA Pincombe project at FT DNA

Pincombe y DNA Study

Thus far I do not have sufficient samples of yDNA results to really say much more than that my 5th cousin who has tested has a 22/25 match with a line that traces back to Barnstaple (my tracing which I shall put online) and that family lore says that the Pincombe family of North/South Molton were the ancestors of the Barnstaple/Bideford Pincombe family. My own line was at Bishops Nympton from the late 1500s to the mid 1800s when they emigrated to Canada although siblings of my 3x great grandfather Robert Pincombe remained in Devon and were still living in the Bishops Nympton area into the 1900s. My 2x great grandfather John Pincombe continued to correspond with his siblings until his death in the 1890s. This correspondence continued between his eldest son John Pincombe (lived at Lobo) and his cousins in Devon and Somerset. However, my grandfather died in 1925 when my mother was only eight years old and the lines of correspondence were lost to my family line. I did manage to pick up the traces somewhat and am in correspondence with a descendant of Robert's son George (my 2x great grandfather John was his older brother).

We have visitors this week and the time is flowing by very quickly. Plus I must get ready for my 30 minute talk on the Guild of One Name Studies to take place 8 Oct 2011 at Library and Archives Canada at Before BIFHSGO. Being Thanksgiving weekend I do not anticipate large numbers in attendance, however I shall give a good overview of the Guild and the value to you of membership in the Guild and the opportunity to showcase your one name study if you have undertaken one. They tend to grow whilst you are busy collecting and particularly with rare names you have a sizeable one name study and become somewhat the expert on that surname. But more on that at the talk :)

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