Wednesday, October 27, 2021

Proofreading, charting for the Romance of the Charley family book

Still proofreading and charting into images to do for the appendices of the Romance of the Charley Family book. The numbers do not always come across but the spacing is good thus far so will do it that way and definitely provide a link to the full copy of the book at the end. There is no greater tribute to an individual than to re-publish their fine work.  

I want to also look at my Routledge-Gray family which was published by my fourth cousin George Dekay almost fifty years ago now. I can see it will be problematic because of the numbering system. I shall have to examine possibilities on how to publish that so that the material does not shift or the numbers get lost. I could consider imaging and now that I have thought about that I will look at that for the Romance of the Charley Family book as well. The problem may be that the print will be too small. I see that the Genealogical Tables can be read and you can enlarge the type in the browser but will have to preview it to see how practical that would be for a lot of text. These books published in small quantity are held by family members but the numbers of family members have increased ten-fold and not enough books to go around for sure. But still it is a very limited publication that just a few people will be interested in. Also I have updating from the earlier history of the family to add in. 

That is one of my projects to do as well. I seem to have limitless projects whenever I look at all the material I have collected in just 18 years of genealogy. It is genealogy mostly being online that has created this enormous quantity of material although I also buy copies of material from the UK Archives at Kew. And there is a lot more that I would like to acquire over time!

Sometimes I think I will be glued to this computer for the rest of my days. Edward used to say that; that I would be spending the rest of my days doing genealogy which I would never look at or think about until after 2003. It was going to England in 2001 and experiencing that sort of serendipity in London when I stayed just around the corner from where my Henry Christopher Buller had his pork Butcher shop that I experienced a desire to look at my ancestry. I did really think I knew anything that I would ever want to know other than the history of my parent's surnames which I hadn't gotten to since my teenage days when I first looked their names up in a surname book at the library. But suddenly there were more people that I did not know about than that I did know about. That plus George Dekay wanting me to write a profile in 2003 of my Pincombe family for the Westminster Township history book of which he was Editor. 

I think Edward was very surprised as he had tried to get me to be interested in genealogy but it didn't look like something that would really interest me. I wondered how you would ever prove that your Blake line in a particular place was the one in the Parish Registers. At that point I had never looked in the Parish Registers but my father always said that Andover was the "home of the Blakes." He meant his Blake family I can see now. So I did imagine thousands of Blake names in the Register. Indeed that is not the case and the lines can be separated out as it turns out having transcribed those registers from the beginning to the mid 1700s! Plus American Research seemed so very difficult to manage; so many records missing and no centralized database during those early years when he worked on it. But I had a lot to learn although I do not do American research. I do not have any American ancestors although I do have second cousins and their children who live there now. But I know all of them! The earliest ancestor of mine to leave the British Isles and settle in Canada was my Routledge family in the summer of 1818. 

On to work; the day begins. Running at 10:30; outside with the dogs at noon; weight lifting at 14:00 and yoga/calisthenics at 15:00 and then a 45 minute walk commencing at 20:00. Otherwise I would spend all day at the computer! Yesterday I did accomplish my aim of doing five of the new DNA matches and getting them into my project; still another 80 to do and at five a day that is 16 days before I can even think to begin phasing my grandparent's DNA!


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