When I first had the idea of a slight revision to James Sanders book "The Siderfin Family of West Somerset" I had no idea that it would result in a complete rewrite and accumulation of new data that has since been scanned and available on line. I now have 44 pages with the original book having 60 pages including the Pedigree Chart and I am just into the Fourth Generation. There are some gaps that I can not fill easily but I can check at the Family Search Library on some of the material in the spring. I do not see myself driving there during the winter.
The next two weeks will hopefully see me through the Fourth Generation and let me move on to the Fifth Generation after publishing the next issue of the Pincombe-Pinkham Newsletter. I did hear back from my Pinkham match and not surprising he is from the Barnstaple Pincombe family. During the 1700s some of the members of this family at Barnstaple starting using the Pinkham surname. I do not really know when the Pinkham surname first arose although I do not find it before the Pincombe surname. When you say Pincombe - it sounds like that to me but I know that my great uncle said it somewhat differently and one could end up spelling it as Pinkham. I wonder at what point the pronunciation changed since the original surname was Pencombe and I do rather think it would have been closer to the way that I have been saying Pincombe.
Although we did see Pincombe cousins when I was a child - mostly at the large funerals - I did not spend a lot of time with any of them so do not know them that well plus I have now lived away from my "growing up" place for more than 45 years. Although when we went back to meet with all of our Pincombe cousins to plan the Pincombe Profile - that was my one request that before I published it I would meet with everyone so that they could look at it and add changes. My own line daughtered out - my mother was a Pincombe and my Pincombe uncle did not have any children. Plus they had left the Pincombe farm (and there were a lot of them) in 1925 years before I wrote the profile so I wanted their input plus I wanted to highlight them in the profile because they were still on the various farms in the area.
Looking at autosomal DNA results can be very interesting. I tend to not really do much with results that are less than 20 centimorgans. However, ancestry can be an exception on occasion as they run all of the results against a piece of software known as Timber which removes "ethnic" lengths from the final result. It can result in a smaller match and I have several good examples in my lines including Pincombe. When I discovered the Pinkham matches who traced back to the New Hampshire/Maine Pinkham family (emigration was in the 1600s) I was pretty shocked actually. I had not expected to find any such matches. I need to look at the trees to see what I can see and that is one of the steps. I also need to look at the matches in common.
The original Pincombe project was created by Dr Richard Pinkham and Galen Pinkham and they did an excellent set of research charts (16 of them in total) and the alternate surname in the project was Pinkham. The thoughts were that it was a singleton surname but the yDNA results of my two cousins (one in Australia and one in the United States) do not match any of the Pinkham yDNA results. One of the cousins who tested is a third cousin once removed and the other is a fifth cousin with our Most Recent Common Ancestor being John Pincomb and Mary Charly who married 8 Nov 1767 at Bishops Nympton, Devon, England and the Australian cousin is descended from their second eldest son William and the American cousin is descended from their third son Robert (also my ancestor). For a while I did try to persuade other cousins to test but with two matching results it did not seem to be necessary but any new testers are always welcomed.
At some point in the past and it was the mid 1700s for the Barnstaple Pincombe family Pincombe members did start using the surname Pinkham. There was some thought that it could have originated as Tinkham but pulling out the available data on the Tinkham family does look like a free standing surname resulting from a placename. It should be an interesting article to write although I again am very leery of matches that are small lengths of autosomal DNA.
I have always felt that my management of the project did not do enough for the Pinkham spelling so hope that can be rectified at some point in the future.
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