Monday, February 13, 2023

Cleaning week begins and the 1861 Census has been completed

Another cleaning week begins and once again the vacuum is where it needs to be. Wish I had thought of this years ago but then I used to do it all in one day when I was younger and then I paid my daughter to clean later so there was a space of years before that daughter went off to do her Masters and I returned to cleaning! 

Completed the 1861 Census from the point of view of capturing the known families. I still have to do that intensive search to discover more families that may be hidden in the census with strange spellings. I will do that once I have put together the BMDs that I have collected into family lines. Again I did not do all that work at the time as I gave the project to my cousin and simply stepped away from it although did keep all the data and did deposit all of that data with the Guild of one name studies at the time. I will see if they want a copy of the book once it is completed although I will not take on the study again as Blake and Pincombe plus my H11 studies are enough for me. Eventually the Kipp Newsletter will also need to find a new editor but for the moment I will continue with that until I have exhausted Edward's material. 

This week I begin the work on the Pincombe-Pinkham Newsletter. I have two projects for this Newsletter; the first one being  the promised comparison with the 16 charts produced by the earlier researchers (Galen Pinkham and Dr Richard Pinkham) and the second a review of the Ancestry autosomal DNA results comparing a number of individuals with the surname Pinkham with myself and my three siblings who have tested at ancestry as well as a cousin for whom I have results. I have a number of known Pincombe cousins as well that I can use the "Shared Matches" tool to see if we have common matches although I will not identify those individuals and my siblings will simply be Sibling 1, 2, and 3. It was a bit of a surprise to see actual values between myself (and siblings) and individuals who believe themselves to be descendant of the New Hampshire/Maine Pinkham family as that would be an extremely distant relationship. However, I do have a small case study in my Blake line using Ancestry data that showed connections between Joanne Blake who married Major General Roberte Sedgwicke 6 Jan 1634 at Andover, Hampshire, England and myself and my siblings. Although Joanne died in London England and her husband died in Jamaica some of their children were known to be born and baptized in Charlestown in the Royal Colony of Massachusetts in the 1630s/1640s. However, the grandparents of Joanne (Blake) Sedgwicke and my ancestor William Blake were known to be cousins both carrying the Blake surnames and going back another two generations Nicholas Blake married his cousin Margaret Blake thus, perhaps, providing sufficient Blake atDNA in common to influence results much much later down the line. The matches are small but Ancestry uses a program called "Timber" which excludes DNA matches that are purely based, in this case, on being "of the British Isles." So a look at these matches with Pinkham are in order most certainly but I would not really draw any conclusions from them unless the trees are documented fully back to the emigrant from the British Isles namely Richard Pinkham said to have arrived at Dover Neck, New Hampshire by 1642 or earlier. 

The next two weeks will be busy doing the comparisons of both the charts and this at DNA data. It will be an interesting project. I do not see any cousin marriages thus far in the known Pincombe family but my research into all of the Pinkham families in the UK is limited to the charts for the most part so I can not really conclude that there are any known Pinkham cousin marriages which would help to concentrate the atDNA so that evidence of match might be seen many generations earlier than is usual. I tend to not use matches less than 20cM but I can not tell the actual size of the matches at Ancestry because of the use of "Timber" to produce the final result given. I do know from matches for which I do have the original data and the "adjusted" data that there can be a decrease in the amount shared in the final result at ancestry (and occasionally it can be larger than I would have anticipated but people who share a common long shared ancestry in say the British Isles are likely to have lengths in common just because of the isolation of the British Isles in terms of the gene pool). 

Thankfully a four year old has been rescued alive in Turkey after 7 days which is wondrous news. May there be many more. But ever there is hope and the crews continue working diligently to free those entombed in the rubble that might still be alive. The death toll continues to rise and more than 36,000 have died. Prayers continuing for the peoples of Turkey and Syria. And prayers for the people of Ukraine because of the barbaric and illegal war that Russia is waging against them.

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