I worked away yesterday looking at Richard le Blake in the records and did manage to separate out the two Blake families who were "closeby" sort of in the areas north of Berkshire and then the Wiltshire group. Definitely I can separate out the Berkshire le Blak family from the le Blake family in Worcestershire/Warwickshire which is a bonus as they had similar forenames. Although I have not proven a direct link between the Richard Blage/Blake on the Chart and Richard le Blak in Berkshire (possibly from Rouen, Normandy after 1274) in the 1300s it does look more interesting in that regard. The next direction is perhaps to see if there are any Lay Subsidies in the 1300s in Berkshire available. I do have a good proof of life and placement for the Robert le Blake line near Calne. I think I will let another month of looking at this pass by without being concerned at the length of time. I did finally find a Dorrant/Durrant family in the 1300s in Norfolk. Since there is an established Blake line in East Anglia dating back into the 1200s/1300s I begin to wonder about the marriage between a Henry Blake of Quemerford/Calne and a daughter of an Edward Dorrant/Durrant naming her as a co-heir but will persist looking at that. Perhaps Burke's Pedigree can be helpful and will check that out.
Other than that I washed the car windows since they were somewhat dusty and the rain rinsed all of that away. I want to order the black earth today and will get that done. My lot is joined and the ground beside the garage has never had any fresh earth in all of these fourty six years so I want to add earth there stamping it down with each thin layer added. There is also a parging spot that has broken on the concrete so need to figure that out. The parging is good otherwise so will do a repair I think but will check with Home Depot on that perhaps they have someone they know who does small repair jobs.
Today I shall work on Pencombe and it will be continuing to draw out the data from Find My Past and enter that into my new Pencombe one-name study file on Legacy.
We are promised a lot of rain today so that is good. I want to start adding black earth to the lawn at the front a little at a time and seed it as I go. This is good grass growing weather for sure. I will do an hour a day to start and work up to a couple of hours but take my time doing that. It would be nice to complete the front yard by mid May. The back will likely take all summer since growing grass in the hotter part of the year is problematic. I shall let the grass grow and the dandelions again for the bees!
Teatime and Latin.
I am also distracted by the latest forward move with DNA looking at the species of birds. Edward and I, for the first eight years of our marriage did a lot of bird watching, astronomy at night and bird watching in the day, when we had breaks. I would say that it was the bird watching that gave Edward the most joy in his last year of life. He has always had bird feeders in the back yard and when he couldn't fill them then we did. He spent hours with his binoculars watching the birds from the windows. It was an enormous source of joy to him. DNA is such a valuable tool in our lives. Its sorting ability can tell us much about the evolution of all the species in our world.
Edward's DNA shows his primarily continental European heritage and it is amazing the matches that come up in ancestry for him (and 23 and Me, FT DNA, My Heritage (I also tested him at Living DNA but his matches there would be rather ancient except for his 2x great grandmother's line from Norfolk (Abs)). The DNA thoroughly supported and proved all of his research which felt good to him in those years as his health became a problem for him (so many of his cousins tested for him to help him sorting through a couple of brick walls and much appreciated that they did). Myself, I wonder what to do with all of this data but have continued collecting it into his files and perhaps there will be someone in the future that will take up the mantle of this research. Edward is 30% German, 30% Dutch (so really 60% Germanic), 20% French, 10% Scandinavian, less than 10% English, less than 10% Polish. Fascinating really how the melting pot of America has given such a variety in DNA to those colonials who bravely tested the oceans coming to America in the 1600s (most of his ancestors arrived in that time frame). Me, I am 100% English with no known ancestral lines from anywhere else except if you go back to the 1700s when I appear to have a line that came from Argyllshire/Ayrshire in the 1640s to Northern Ireland and then to Shropshire/Warwickshire area and even earlier in the 1400s the Routledges came to the Borderlands (Cumberland).
I shall keep reading all these studies on bird DNA as I also really enjoy watching the birds. I should put bird feed out but my neighbours have a lovely setup which I can see from my windows and already this spring has been amazing.
The Pencombe family awaits and extraction from Find My Past.
Still nothing back from my newest cousin (descended from my maternal grandmother's half sister). There was a picture of my grandmother's parents Edwin Denner Buller and Ellen (Taylor) Buller that my grandmother had let her youngest sister take with her to Chicago when their half sister's family moved there (Florence had been asked by the Birmingham Union to take in Sarah to give her a family life as she was still quite young when they came to Canada). At that point none of my grandmother siblings or my grandmother knew they had a half-sister. Sarah forgot to take the picture with her when she got married and the half-sister's family moved to California. Unfortunately there was a house fire there and we thought everyone had perished but a granddaughter of Florence's had survived so I did ask if they had the picture but so far no news. Maybe sometime I will hear back. It would be most exciting to have that picture. Because our match is so small we are just half-cousins. Edwin Denner Buller was in South Africa and became a medic at the time of the First Boer War but was injured and sent home to the very hospital where Florence was living with her mother. In fact, Ellen Taylor, her mother, grew up just a couple of blocks from where Edwin grew up and so they knew each other and they were married a few years later. My grandmother was eleven when her mother died and fourteen when her father died so did remember a lot of stories which she shared with the inquisitive grand daughter. I would be just really happy with a good scan of the picture if it survived. I am not into keeping old pictures (I give them all to my younger sister).
On to work; the day passes quickly. It will rain here for days now and it is our rainy season and our flood season so time will tell since there isn't a huge winter snow melt we may not get a lot of flooding here but the west may as may the east.
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