Waking this morning early and hearing the news that an asteroid flew within 2600 kilometres above the Earth. Asteroid 2023BU (3.8 by 8.5 metres) flew by at 53,000 km/hr (approximately) early this morning with its closest trajectory just across the southern hemisphere nearest to the southern tip of South America. What if we could put imaging equipment on an asteroid that could show us its travels around the universe? The asteroid was first reported by a citizen scientist (amateur stargazer) - Gennadiy Borisov at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory in Nauchnyi, Crimea. Great work! Now if we could only harness that piece of rock and let it tell its story of travels around the universe. We are not there yet but we could be if everyone put their mind to what is important in this universe.
Yesterday, once again, great accomplishment on the extraction of material from the Somerset Protestation Returns - the originals are available online at the Parliamentary Archives Library and I have a CD with the transcriptions. Although only 1/3rd of these records are extant they just happen to be the area in which I am most interested. That extraction is now complete and I have moved onto the subsidies of 1641 and 1642 also on the CD. The extraction of that material precedes again today.
With two sets of information confirming Robert Siderfin in Minehead and his two sons - one at Minehead and Wootton Courtney and the second at Selworthy - I will try to discover if their sister Wilmot married at Minehead. I need to check the burials there as well. There was also lots of information on the William line at Luxborough and the Thomas line. Still working through all the information and I need to spend some time on the fiche for these early parish registers which I purchased years ago now but set aside when I let my cousin have the one-name study for Siderfin. But, if I can, I would like to update James Sanders' book and move it on to this next century knowing that sometime in the future another will pick up the challenge and carry the Siderfin family forward in time. After all, I, an uninterested person in genealogy until 2003, have been an avid searcher since then scouring the records for information. All it took really was my cousin twisting my arm to do a profile for one of the many profiles in the Westminster and Delaware History Books that he was editing and the Siderfin family came to light once again as the name had been forgotten in my line. But along with that profile, DNA testing came to the forefront and initially not really greeted with the enthusiasm it later would create, you pretty much need to do your DNA to have a study now!
I hope to work up the Fourth Generation with its breakdown into four subsets in the next two weeks and then on to the Fifth Generation. Each one a little more difficult and possibly less evidence - time will tell - but eventually in some of the lines I will get to the Census from 1841 on and then more information available once again. For my Siderfin line when Elizabeth (Betty) Siderfin married John Rew she basically drops out of the Siderfin line and into the Rew line and it was her daughter Elizabeth Rew who married John Pincombe so my line is back quite aways in actual fact which was another reason to give it to my cousin at the time (his surname was Siderfin). Elizabeth Rew was born in 1801 over two hundred years ago (she and her twin sister Charlotte) but their descendants carry some lengths of DNA that pass on and on through the endless line of people who descend from her.
I had forgotten that I do have the two subsidies for Somerset on disc and so have also extracted Blake from the data along with Siderfin and a number of other names. But I still hope to get into the Family Search Library to extract Blake from the many other subsides. This particular disc has a list of all the subsidies that were taken during several hundred years and has information on the status extant or not that is rather helpful.
So another day of extraction and perhaps sneaking a look at the Minehead fiche - luckily an index was created for Minehead that I also purchased on fiche which makes that rather a treat to look at. My eyes have been strong through all of this searching although I keep it up for perhaps 30 to 40 minutes and then take a break - a good walk around and about.
A bit early for breakfast; I have had my cup of tea so shall perhaps wander around for a bit. Solitaire games all played as that is generally my first thing to do but when I went to prepare my tea I generally turn on the news to see what is happening in the world and there it was - that lovely asteroid story and into my mind jumped the idea of putting monitoring equipment on such asteroids as they wheel about the universe. What would we see? would it be a worthwhile effort? I think that anything that lets us see the universe is worthwhile! Must get the telescope out one of these days - the nights are rather cold at the moment though. I prefer my binoculars in the winter for sure.
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