The Newsletters have somewhat become a means of publishing my transcriptions plus discussing thoughts that I have with material that I discover in depositories on this rather interesting family. My own line tends to be rather quiet in their little part of north west Hampshire. They appear to stay in this area (at least my line going back into the latter part of the 1600s) and moving any further back one does find the very occasional descendant who went off to the royal colonies in America (thus far just Massachusetts). One of my many reasons for taking on the one-name Blake study was to see what further details I could find on my own direct line as well as to separate it out from the Blake family at Calne to which my line is likely only related on the female side (namely Richard Blake married Jone Blake in the early 1580s at Andover) and Richard Blake was the youngest son of Nicholas Blake and his wife Margaret. This Richard had some land and a draper shop in Andover. As the youngest, his inheritance was small but he managed to accumulate some land and monies so that he was quite influential in Andover including his involvement in the First Free School of Andover. There are though a number of founding Blake families in the British Isles and I was (and remain) keen to understand their early origins. That was the intent of the Newsletter to share some of that information with members of the Blake y-DNA study at FT DNA.
Magically our landscape has changed colour almost overnight with the yellow being the predominant this year although our maple is a brilliant crimson red at the crown. Fall is definitely here and always enjoyed by me. The nights are much longer now and that always seem to happen so quickly so that my work time has increased to a certain extent although caring for my husband is still taking up a great deal of my time which I am very happy to do. My hope is that he can recover sufficiently to take on more of his own studies and complete some of the work that he has been doing.
Downsizing though has become one of our commonest discussions as we hand off the accumulations of 54 years of marriage. We did a lot of sales in the 60s where we acquired memorabilia of many of his families in the Princeton, Ontario area. Now we are trying to reattach that to families that might like to have it. Certainly when we were in our early 20s we did not think of how to disperse all of that material as my husband acquired it for his own interest. But now it is time to ensure that this material finds a good home with people who would like to have memorabilia of their family and often they are much closer to the line than we are. Some of the material we passed to the University since it was historically significant and would provide researchers with interesting material when they were doing their research. But all of that material has now been passed to repositories for the most part. The latest downsizing has seen the accumulation of all the books, material, slides, talks that were produced during the time that my husband and his friend George Anderson created trips to New York State for the United Empire Loyalist Association as well as for the Sir John Johnson Manor House in the Cornwall area. That has ended up being a sizeable collection which I hope will be handy for that group in their future endeavours as we will never do those trips again and have not done any for quite a few years.
COVID-19 and we are into the second wave. I am putting some of our own precautions back on once again. We will avoid going out except for our daily walks and groceries once again. We always wear masks when in indoor spaces and have them on hand in outdoor spaces just in case.
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