Last night we went kayaking around 7:00 pm and it was a marvelous time in the evening. The beavers were busy working their way back and forth across the channel after a long hot day when they probably spent it sheltering in their dens. One beaver in particular caught my attention as he/she veered away from me as I was quietly kayaking down the stream. My daughter was looking at a Great Blue Heron when I spotted the beaver which then headed downstream the way I was going so I followed. We kept up that interesting following game for a little bit until he/she turned and looked at me and then swam away. Curious I guess.
Worked away on the Siderfin book yesterday. I have formally begun the 5th generation and perhaps have solved the mystery of who was John Siderfin baptized in 1630 at Loughborough. These generations are becoming clearer as I work my way through the records. James Sanders did an excellent job with the data back in the early 1900s and I could only have wished that he had kept the entire will in his notes as they are now lost except for his notes in the bombing of the Exeter Record Office. Such a loss; the loss of history is a huge loss to those who follow. It is history that tells us how to manage really; the loss of history is a sad event.
The solitaire games were interesting today. Each has its own challenge and I can feel my brain warming up as I work my way through the five games each day. I think at 77 nearly 78 it is necessary to do brain games just to keep the juices flowing. I used to wake up every morning eager for the day when I was a child and I still do that but perhaps with a little less of that bouncy tendency which my siblings did find to be rather "off the wall" first thing in the morning. It was nice to be in the attic where I could enjoy that wondrous feeling of being awake in God's world.
Today we have rain hopefully. The ground is dry once again. But for sure the rhododendrons are about to open into flower so rain is guaranteed! I think though they might be a week late this year but I am not an expert on flowers for sure but Edward was often commenting that the seasons were shifting. The garden is up and the little shoots are pushing their way towards the sky; the predictable thing in life is that plant life is constantly growing once the snow passes just as the plants start to die down in the fall as the time for the snow falls comes back into view. My favourite season remains winter - I love the long research time. It is delicious to have so much time to just work away on my projects.
My forays into health care are ended for a while now. The surgery for cataracts likely in December and I must have a routine checkup sometime this summer as it is nearly 18 months since I spoke with my family doctor. The time passes so quickly and the medical world is really set up so that if you need something sort of now like a tetanus shot then there is a critical care unit closeby where you can go and wait in a queue for your turn. If it is just routine then you can just book that and have any general tests done like blood work. I try to be prepared for that appointment so that everything that I think I might need is in my thoughts. I remember my mother with seven children made notes when she took us to the doctor. Organization is what is always needed in one's life. Disorganization doesn't do well in an organized society such as homo sapiens tends to live in. Even the hunter-gatherers were organized in their own way so that they made the best use of the land around them during every season.
So on to the day. More work on the Siderfin book. I think I can see that I will have completed it before the end of the year. Then I will take off a month to six weeks and just rest my eyes doing any suggested exercises on my eyes to aid in their recovery before I launch myself into the next book - likely Pencombe as I see it now. I need to acquire more material on Blake before writing a book about the Blake family of Andover, Hampshire, England. I will restrict the book to that Blake line although it is possible that it will bring in the Blake family that was eventually at Calne due to the possibility of a marriage between a daughter of Richard le Blak (of Rouen, Normandy) who lived at Wargrave Berkshire in the 1300s and an individual who lived in the Andover area of Hampshire. There is a likely connection between these Blake lines (given the mention in old records from the 1600s/1700s/1800s) and the wills show it to me but not so clearly that I can actually prove at this point in time that a daughter of Richard le Blak married someone with the name of John (with perhaps a location type of addition to that name) who became John Blake (took his wife's surname since surnames were not common in England amongst the indigenous population in the late 1200s/early 1300s) found in the early Andover Manor Records (early 1300s). Now that I have found those records that I photographed in Salt Lake City and I am doing my Latin lessons once again I can work at transcribing them but that is a project for next winter which I shall do whilst I am writing up the Pencombe family of Herefordshire and Devon. Also a major task and I will need a number of documents transcribed for the Pincombe family of Devon that I already have and perhaps acquire more of them by the same method as I am acquiring the Inquisition Postmortem of John de Pencombe from the 1300s in Herefordshire.
After Pencombe and Blake I am beginning to see the potential for other books now. The Routledge family is an interesting one and my likely seventh cousin in England has done a lot of work on the early family. We are somewhat lucky with that family as we know that our line is the Oakshaw (Yakeshaw) Routledge family and the records for this family go back into the 1400s/1500s in the Borderlands of northern England. He has traced them back to their Highland roots (before 1400) and is bringing them forward. I think I would just write about the descendants of William Routledge and Grissell Routledge who lived in the latter part of the 1600s at Bewcastle. They had seven known children. I would perhaps tie that in with Thomas (my 7th cousin's work) but not write up that portion since he is doing such excellent work. Then the lines coming down from Thomas Routledge and Elizabeth Routledge both descendants of this couple in Canada in the London, Ontario area. George DeKay wrote the initial book but he always regretted not doing more on some of the members of this family and so I will take the opportunity to write more about the work of Sir John Carling (my great grandmother's first cousin). Their mothers were sisters and daughters of Thomas Routledge and Elizabeth Routledge. When the old Ministry of Agriculture building was torn down here in Ottawa I did feel a tinge of sadness since the building was named after him but there remain many monuments to his memory both in the Central Experimental Farm and one of the main thoroughfares named Carling Street. Since I live here I can go to the Archives and find out more about his work in Agriculture which was considered ground breaking at the time and quite phenomenal. I will do that book in memory of George DeKay who wrote the first book on these families. Although the books I write will be principally for my siblings children and my own, I will share them with Family Search if they wish to have copies (and the various record offices in England where my ancestors lived) and locally if there is a desire in the local repositories.
I am a bit of a dreamer with regard to how I will spend my time but a realist in my every day activities as the day unfolds.
Amazingly it is past 7:00 and I still have a bit of computer work to do before breakfast. On to the day.
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