Presentation - 2

I continued today looking at my presentation plus I was babysitting Jackson. The day passed quickly but my presentation has a few good changes and likely there will be more in the next couple of months.

Tomorrow will be Canada Day so my transcriptions may not move along quite yet. My eyes are not greatly restored again and ready to tackle the difficult transcription ahead. Both sets of material will be difficult. I think I will try to do two hours on Andover and then two hours on Timberscombe each day. Usually I can do six to eight hours but these particular pages are quite difficult to read.

My daughter and I also spent some time looking at apartments. That task is still ahead to do and then the moving although the movers will do all that heavy lifting which will be nice. Fortunately she doesn't have very much anyway.

I am amazed that we are now half way through the year. This one has passed very quickly and I rather think the next half will pass quickly as well.

DNA Case Studies - Presentation

I decided to work on my Presentation yesterday and today. I have 58 slides prepared. I will need to update them just prior to the presentation with any changes but they are basically ready to go in terms of format. I need to write an Abstract and Bio for the Conference Booklet.

Initially I wondered what cases I would use but when I finally settled into it my cover page just appeared suddenly to me and then I decided to introduce my case studies briefly as part of the introduction. That flowed very well and then I started into the five case studies that I will present. They are all my own family lines except I will discuss the T haplogroup/T2 haplogroup studies and end with Mary Polly Case. Mary Polly has always appealed to me out of all of Ed's ancestors - she is his 3x great grandmother and was orphaned. She was born in Dublin but sent to Halifax to live where she married at the age of 18 years. Although her father is likely John Casey very very little is known about her family life in Ireland.

Other than that my day passed quickly as most of it was spent on the presentation.

Tomorrow I shall work on the transcription plus I will have Jackson over to babysit.

T haplogroup Study-2

Still working away on the study and haven't gotten back to transcription. I hope to do that soon. We have been really busy with the garden and some dog-sitting. We went out and bought a yard pole and leash for the younger dog so that we can just sit outside sometimes with him when he comes. In the heat of the day it keeps him back in the shade since he loves to run about. I know my transcription will not disappear so will leave it until I have lots of time again which will likely be soon :)

I need to have my bio, etc. prepared by July 17 for inclusion in the Syllabus for the conference in September. I am mulling about the items that I will talk about and then I need to touch base with the other DNA presenter just to review what I am going to talk about. I can see some positives and negatives with doing that actually. She is a well known speaker and might object to some of my thoughts. I have a number of studies that I could use and I am not prepared to share any of the details online which might make our discussions non-productive. Anyway I shall contact her as she herself may not wish to speak with me which would work out quite well actually. Since I will be using personal items or items from one name studies we are unlikely to overlap. I will stick to my English/Irish/Scot DNA research since this is a British Isles Family History Society Conference.

Srawberries are ready now and so that will be the delicacy for the next couple of weeks. I made strawberry shortcake yesterday and today. We do not use whipping cream anymore so not quite so many calories. We were off for a bike ride this morning (15.5 kilometres) and missed the rain very nicely. It is slightly overcase this evening and cooling down. Usually we just get a few days of heat in a row and then a cooling spell.

I ordered an extended haplogroup study for my paternal line today and one of the new SNPs L161 to see if our line will be ancestral or derived for that one. one of the I2-Isles-D is derived. Other than knowing that my line was at Andover in the late 1400s on paper and that published histories claim this line goes back to Blakelands (near Calne Wiltshire) in the late 1200s I do not have any further information on the BLAKE line. I do not have any stories of them coming over with William the Conqueror. No immigration stories. No hint that they may be descendants of the Roman soldiers that came to Britain. They owned property at Blakelands and other places in that area in the 1200s right up to the 1500s and then they basically disappear from that area as they moved southward towards the New Forest area where they are found in the 1600s, 1700s and up to the present and eastward towards Andover where my family line is found from the late 1400s to the present. In 1757 Joseph Blake of Andover married Joanna King of Upper Clatford (her father was a farmer and Joanna was his only child). The Blake family (mine) are found at Upper Clatford from that time forward until my grandfather became a blacksmith and moved to Eastleigh where he worked for the railway.

Waiting to hear more about the WTY and my husband's null 425 group. Once that result is in he could test for any new SNPs.

Tomorrow I shall spend some time on transcription unless something else gets in the way.

T haplogroup study

I decided that I really needed to enter the GenBank data into my spreadsheet and that ended up taking most of the day yesterday. Plus I needed to go and buy my daughter some presents for her birthday (already one day late!) but she hadn't given me hints. I ended up buying some "household" items and hope that she likes them.

Very warm weather finally here and the cold chills of the winter are finally disappearing. It is very cold here and it isn't until the really warm days of summer come that I can feel that dreadful minus 30 feeling slipping away from me. It takes about two or three weeks of really hot weather (i.e. over 35 celsius) for me to feel that it is really very very warm. Mind you we do have central air conditioning so is perhaps unfair of me to say that it takes time to get too much hot weather since I am always comfortable indoors.

I need to get back to my transcriptions and I am perhaps dreading that a little as both of the sets that I am transcribing in concert are very very difficult. It would be nice to see them both though and that will eventually inspire me to return. My portable continues its sterling recovery. I do not use it a lot (for Skype to talk to my daughters on occasion) although with both my husband and I now having laptops it makes going to repositories much much easier. Of course my interest in genealogy stems only from 2003 although I have certainly put a lot of time into it since then. It occupied all of my non-working hours for about four years whilst I was doing all the course work at the National Institute for Genealogical Studies. I also want to work on my CG next winter just to bring myself to that level of genealogical research. I purchased the application way back at FGS in Boston which seems so long ago now but as I did more and more research on my own I realized that I wasn't ready to put CG after my name although I am using my postnomials from the National Institute, PLCGS (Professional Learning Certificate in Genealogical Studies).

Other than that we are gardening and that is growing quickly. We had our usual "battles" with the wild bunnies as to whom was going to eat various crops but wire cages solved that problem and we let the clover grow a little longer to give them lots of greens until everything is big enough that we can all share :)

Tomorrow I will get back to my transcriptions I rather think.

Connecting to the Internet

My portable decided to not connect to the Internet so I spent a day looking into that and I discovered that my Toshiba can go backwards in time and reset the system. A great tool and I took it back before I had loaded PANDO and before we had been away for a couple of days. Then a couple of other fixes and presto I was connecting once again to the internet with a plus. Since the new Rogers Virus package was setup I couldn't see my desktop computer from my portable and now I can - a real plus as I use that feature to transfer files from the portable back to the desktop which is my usual computer to use when we are at home. I back that computer up regularly and only use my laptop as a portable notebook basically although it can do lots of things and has an enormous harddrive. I have 180 useable GBs on the portable with 110GB free which means that I can download as many images as I can possibly collect in one trip of a couple of days in a library.

I also thought some more about the Hinxman family and realized that the William Hinxman will that I transcribed whilst we were in New York is likely the grandson of Eleanor (Blake) Hinxman rather than the son. He mentions his cousins Noyse which would be the children of his Aunt Jane (Hinxman) Noyse. I haven't really thought about the Hinxman family with respect to generations because my interest was always in seeing whether they mentioned their Blake cousins which they did not. William, my ancestor, died in 1696 at Foxcott without a will and I would dearly love to know the names of his children other than the parish register plus the children of his children other than the parish register. William was constantly selling off leases to his siblings (likely to provide a living for himself, his wife (Anne Hellier Blake) and his children: William (baptized 9 August 1647), John (baptized 10 May 1649), and Dorothy (baptized 8 Sep 1655). Possibly there was another daughter but I need to continue transcribing the Andover Parish Registers to understand that. William (the son) disappears from the records at Andover as far as I can tell thus far. For the daughter Dorothy I have no other entries. John married Elizabeth and they had 11 children of whom 5 died in infancy. Of the remaining children 4 were sons: Thomas (baptized 21 Feb 1685 and my ancestor), John (baptized 23 Nov 1690), William (baptized 9 January 1698), and Joseph (baptized 24 Feb 1702)and all at Andover. Two daughters were baptized: Margaret 8 January 1689 and Elizabeth 27 Oct 1695. John's wife Elizabeth was buried at Andover 12 Sep 1712. My ancestor Thomas was buried 29 Jan 1714 at Andover. His brother John was buried 27 Nov 1729 at Andover. His brother Joseph was buried 20 Mar 1784 at Andover.

William, the father who appears to be buried at Foxcott 1696, never worked again as a priest. He could have been a teacher and I haven't found the records. No mention is made of his being ordained in his burial record. The lines state: William Blake of Foxkett [May} 1. There are few references to location so this must have been meaningful to the priest and to separate him from other William Blake entries perhaps but I need to transcribe the register to determine that. Since there are continuing land records for this William well into the late 1680s and early 1690s it would appear to be the correct person as the records tend to deal with Foxcott.

Today I hope to return to transcribing. My shoulder is improving and would tolerate longer periods typing.

Yesterday I also worked on the T study looking at the scientific papers published and adding those details to the database.

Timberscombe Bishops Transcripts - 3

I did go ahead with the next page of the Bishops Transcripts for Timberscombe and it was brutal! I did manage to complete it and will work on it again tomorrow. I have also decided to go back to working on the Andover Parish Records at the same time. The second Parish Register is rather difficult and working on two difficult ones will probably keep me moving along at a steady pace for both of them - the Andover being slightly better!

Looked at the Hinxman family once again and the IGI. Looking at the Tax/Subsidy Records for the 1500s there appears to be only one Hinxman line at Andover headed by William Senior. He has a son William Junior and possibly a son Joseph. There isn't anything yet to clearly show that Joseph's father was William. I know more about Joseph because his son Joseph married Eleanor Blake (sister to my Richard). The association between the Blake and Hinxman family continues through the 1600s and would appear to end in the early 1700s. At least I do not find any records linking them after this date at Foxcott where my Blake ancestors lived in the early 1700s.

I searched on FMP again today looking at the Dockland Ancestors records. Since these include the Church in Bermondsey - St Mary Magdalen - I hope to find more information on my Beard, Hemsley and Buller families there. I did find information on Edward Beard (brother to Henry my 4x great grandfather). I know that the Beard family lived on Grange Road as did John Hemsley possible father to my Elizabeth Hemsley who married Henry Beard in 1766 at Bermondsey (St Mary Magdalen). Their daughter Mary (no baptism found yet) married Christopher Buller prior to 1796 when they are mentioned in Henry Beard's will. I also had a look at the Routledge family but no records for Cumberland. I must have pulled up over 100 records today having a good look here and there.

My George Lywood was mentioned in his marriage lines as a Waterloo Pensioner but I do not find him at Waterloo - he did receive a clasp for the Peninsula Campaign as he was at Martinique. Perhaps the reference to Waterloo Pensioner was because he served in the campaign that led up to Waterloo. He was in the 23rd Regiment of Foot and I had the good luck to visit the Welsh Regimental Museum in Wales when we were on our tour. I purchased their book which gives an excellent history of the Regiment. George was my first ancestor to step foot in Canada as he was here at Halifax with the 23rd Regiment in 1807 before heading off to Martinique.

Still bothered somewhat by my shoulder so will write a little less! I will again carry on with Timberscombe and Andover Parish Registers. I need to contact one of the speakers in the Fall to go over my case histories that I will speak about for DNA. I am sure that she isn't thinking about it very much at the moment but I think it might be timely to contact her so that we could set a date to speak about the case histories sometime in late July or early August. This will be my last presentation. I find it just takes up too much time preparing for the talks and I really much prefer to do research.

Find My Past - 2

I decided to still not do too much typing today. That meant I didn't touch the Timberscombe Bishops Transcripts. Instead I spent a little time searching on Find My Past - just a few letters and a whole list of data appears. I looked at the Taylor family in Birmingham/Lancashire to see if I could find any clues for Ellen Taylor (my great grandmother and my mtDNA line), Blake, Knight, Butt, Pincombe, and then a long look at the BMDs in Dorset. That is a real bonus to have the records for Dorset as it is the one record office that will not sell Parish Register Fiche/Film to me. I have acquired a number of documents on Ancestry from one of the public trees but this set of records will also help to fatten up the bare bones that I have for many of my Dorset ancestors.

I have been doing my shoulder exercises as I had moved away from them the last couple of months since my shoulder appeared to be so much better. I think it is quite a bit better but suspect that it is a lifelong necessity to continue doing the exercises at least a couple of times a week. I shall do that.

We celebrated Father's Day this evening with a lovely meal at a local restaurant. My husband had his favourite pork side ribs and I had a 1/4 chicken meal which was also very good. Then we went back to our daughter and her fiance's home for a chatting time and to talk about the wedding. It should be quite beautiful and I said that I would do the cake. I will do a preliminary run with the cake for the Engagement Party later in the summer. We will see how well I do with that and if I am pleased (and they are as well :) ) then I will do the wedding cake.

I uploaded the bare bones gedcom to Find My Past and when they open it up to matching that could prove interesting as all my ancestors are English. Perhaps in the near future that will happen. I have been very lucky with Genes Reunited.

Tomorrow I hope to get back to the Timberscombe Bishops Transcripts.

Find My Past

I finally decided to subscribe to Find My Past as their 15% off offer is just too good to pass up especially as there is a 20% off for loyalty next year when I renew! I also subscribe to Ancestry and with the new Canadian records online plus all the material that they have on their system for British records I find it very very handy as well.

No accomplishment on Timberscombe today but I decided that my shoulder acting up probably meant that I was overdoing the typing and should take a couple of days off. Instead I have worked away at a few items plus we had a 14.8 km bike ride. My daughter and I continued to look at apartments and called the companies that were most interesting. One doesn't have anything available but we discovered that the other company has about 8 buildings in the area with 10 vacancies of one bedroom apartments. Good show with that and we can do some earnest looking. Also it will be possible to determine what to sell from her old apartment since she will not need the rugs she had to buy for the last one in the new one.

I am giving my shoulder a rest so that will be all for today. Tomorrow I may go back to a little work on the Timberscombe Bishops Transcripts.

Finding an apartment

We, my daughter and I, spent yesterday looking at apartments via the internet. We found two very interesting ones and just have to wait now and see if they are available. It is fascinating hunting for an apartment one thousand miles away from your location on the web. You can go into Google Maps and trace the streets to locations and see the store fronts, the library and where you are going to work. The only thing you do not get is the real feel for distance although you can estimate just from the size of the houses/apartment buildings/etc.

We also went out shopping and found yet another pot of flowers (on sale) that will look great on the porch. We are going to have the engagement party for our daughter and future son in law in August and I want some plant pots to put around the back yard (hoping for a non rainy day!) since we will have a "tea" in the backyard for the announcement. We will be about 30 people so should be able to manage that fairly well plus there will be people dropping in probably during the two hours. Our gardens will just be at their best by August so should be quite lovely. Ed has put in a lot of bedding plants as per usual and more flowers this year than vegetables. We need fewer and fewer vegetables for just the two of us.

Hence I did not touch the Timberscombe Bishop Transcripts. I shall try to get in some time on them today but it looks to be another busy one so may not put in a lot of hours. I did spend some time looking at the Mecklenburg 1819 census for my husband's Schulz/Passow/Naumann ancestors. These records are totally in German but actually are fairly searchable on Ancestry. We know the birthplace for his great grandparents - Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Schulz was born at Brohm and Fredericka Rachell Naumann was born at Staven. We have parents for both and I hunted for them on the 1819 census but it will require extracting all the Schulz entries in the area and translating the entries to determine which one since there are many many Johann Schulz and also the second and third name entries. The same with the entries for Charles Naumann. He and Sophia may or may not have been married and it would be neat to determine that. We need to borrow the parish registers from the Family History Library in Salt Lake City.

An online friend has kindly said that he will check the Little Cheverell registers for a marriage between John Tanner and Ann Stratton which I have from the IGI 27 Jan 1752 at Little Cheverell. Although they marry at Little Cheverell both of their children Sarah (baptized 31 Dec 1758) and John (baptized 10 Mar 1756) were baptized at Tilshead where they appeared to have lived and I found a burial for Ann Stratton Tanner 2 Oct 1779 at Tilshead but no burial for John. I checked these records when we were at Salt Lake City in the Tilshead parish registers where I also found the gratifying confirmation that Jeremiah Rawlings who married Sarah Tanner at Tilshead 1 Nov 1780 was indeed Jeremiah Rawlings from Enford (hence my ancestor). Jeremiah and Sarah Rawlings were my four x great grandparents. Since it is 1752 I do not expect to find a lot in the entry but I may be lucky with the priest recording home parish if not Little Cheverell.

Tomorrow I want to work on the Bishop Transcripts as the day doesn't have anything scheduled yet!It will be nice when I am caught up to the Parish Register fiche so that I have that second check on the transcripts. They are a derived document from the original registers which, in this case, are missing for the 1600s up to 1656 although these Bishop Transcripts exist from 1599 to 1655 but have breaks (I am moving from 1611 to 1621 in this first large break).

Timberscombe Bishops Transcripts - 2

I continued with the Timberscombe Bishops Transcripts and completed up to the end of 1611. The next set of records is for 1621. There are now 59 baptisms, 13 marriages and 56 burials. It is nice to see more baptisms than burials. I found a Pincombe in this set of transcriptions - Dorothy the wife of George Pincombe was buried. Two years later George Pincombe was buried. Perhaps this is an older couple but there was a Pincombe family in the Timberscombe/Wootton Courtney area. Finding a George Pincombe there is the early 1600s is certainly interesting.

We went for a 14 kilometre bike ride this morning when it was cool. It was pleasant riding along the river edge and then we came back by the highway.

Tomorrow I shall work on the Timberscombe Bishops Transcripts once again. I have now completed 10 of the 127 scans. This will be the more difficult portion as the writing is 17th century English and usually quite tiny. As I reach the 18th and 19th century especially it will be easier to transcribe.

Timberscombe Bishops Transcripts - 1

I started working on the Timberscombe records today and I am using the FreeREG templates with the GSU Number and Film Number tacked on the end. Thus far I have completed to the end of 1605 with 20 baptisms, 6 marriages and 28 burials. The next page is missing the top portion so the March/April 1606 baptisms are lost except for one single name which I can read - Nurcombe. I was actually surprised to find Nurcombe at Timberscombe as they tended to be at Wiveliscombe in the 1600s. However those records are a later time period so perhaps this is a very interesting discovery. My 3x great grandmother Elizabeth Siderfin's aunt Ann married John Nurcombe in the early 1800s at Selworthy with his parents John Nurcombe and Mary Chapman marrying at Wootton Courtney.

I expect that I will learn a great deal from these registers and I am rather hopeful to find my Moggridge family there in the early days. I did learn that the Moggridge family are actually a Devon family which moved into Somerset in the 1600s. They still remained in Devon as well at Twitchen which was later farmed by Thomas Pincombe (youngest brother of my 3x great grandfather Robert Pincombe).

I had an interesting query for Bishops Nympton on the Snell family. The Snell family continued to live at Bishops Nympton well into the 1900s and are found in the 1770s in the Parish Register for their first entries at Bishops Nympton. One of those many interesting families that arrived in the 1700s along with my Charley family. It is curious why they decided to come to Bishops Nympton at that time. As I learn more and more about the area that detail may well reveal itself. My Pincombe line is found there continuously from the late 1500s.

Tonight my husband gave a very interesting lecture on his family lines that emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony (from England mostly) in the 1600s. He could do the same talk with his Dutch ancestors to New Amsterdam in the 1600s actually as he has a number of rather interesting people there as well. It still amazes me that so much of his family history was lost when they came to Canada although with early deaths of mothers who would have carried the stories to the children one can understand this loss of knowledge. I can never decide which one is the most interesting but I honestly have never seen so many Baptists ministers in one person's family line!

The next project to prepare for is my talk at BIFHSGO in the Fall on Case Studies. I have pretty well covered a number of studies already which includes my husband's Kipp line which is interesting but no new candidates to add to the knowledge of the three brother's descendants. I will probably not discuss the Kipp line this time. I would like to do my Blake line and will continue to hunt out information on that line. There is also the T study which I have finally finished proofreading and certainly there are interesting items in the results that I could discuss. I need to review that with my three co-investigators before hand to ensure that I am not including anything that they would prefer to wait until publication of our paper.

Tomorrow I will continue to work on the Timberscombe Bishops Transcripts.

Timberscombe Parish Registers - Bishops Transcripts

I finally managed to download my scans for doing the BMDs of Timberscombe from Pando. A very interesting program which has its problems with Vista but works perfectly with XP. There are some fixes to make it work on Vista but I decided to just use XP! I have 127 scans now from LDS via the Somerset OPC group (I an OPC for Timberscombe and a few others). I also have the fiche from the Somerset Record Office that I can compare with the Bishops Transcript scans.

I didn't make a start today as planned on the Timberscombe registers - I did get everything organized to begin though which is a necessary first step. The day was a busy one restocking the refrigerator and unpacking from our days away. I need to transfer my images over from my portable that I took at Archives Ontario. We also visited ROM so I took about 200 images of the Egyptian exhibit to share with our daughters who couldn't come with us unfortunately. They will enjoy them. The Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit begins at the end of June and we will go back to see that exhibit once again. I saw it in Montreal a number of years ago but always worth a second look (and this will actually be a third look).

I also have my images of the Routledge Township papers and the Thomas Talbot maps that I took. I would like to transcribe the names on the blocks of land in London Township with respect to Lot # and Concession # using the Talbot maps. My Routledge families are spread across five concessions all in a line around lots 24 to 27 beginning with Concession 3 and ending with concession 9. They still farm some of that land.

Tomorrow I will begin the Timberscombe registers plus do the washing. It was supposed to rain here today and did look like it on and off all day. So I will need to do that tomorrow.

Archives of Ontario

We visited the Archives of Ontario building on the York University campus this past week - an excellent opportunity presented itself and we leaped at it. The new building is absolutely grand. The microfilm readers are an absolute gem with large flat screens and automatic winders in abundance. I spent quite a bit of time recording the township papers for my Routledge family as they were Talbot Settlers arriving in 1818 and on their land in 1819. There were a number of documents for each of them. I did not find though the documents for George Kennedy their son in law.

As well my husband had excellent luck investigating his German great grandparents. More on this later. We also went to his Public School Reunion in Princeton Ontario where he saw classmates of 50 to 58 years ago. A truly remarkable event with lots of old pictures to find him and his brother in.

I kept meaning to write in my blog but by evening when we were done for the day exhaustion took over and I was fast asleep without recording a single word.

Tomorrow I want to start on the Timberscombe Parish Registers.

Andover Parish Registers - 25

The Andover Parish Register #1 is now complete with 2518 baptisms, 632 marriages and 2050 burials. I will get back to the second register (it also interests me a great deal!) after I work on the Timberscombe Parish Records which I am doing from the e-scans. However, I have a couple of projects that will occupy me for the remainder of this week.

I worked on my laptop today to clean up all the files. I use my laptop whenever we are doing research at the repositories and I transfer the files when I get back home each night. However since our trip to Salt Lake City I haven't been able to keep caught up as I have so much on the go. I decided that today was the day to clean up the laptop and now I have 110 GB free to load on lots of new material plus I am still thinking of doing the project of extracting the names from the hospital register in the 1850s. It makes for interesting reading and would capture a picture of the people in the area (at least those that attended a hospital/doctor in the area.

Tomorrow I will continue working away at a couple of projects. I have been helping my husband prepare a slide show which also took up some of the time.

Andover Parish Registers - 24

Unfortunately, I did not complete the Andover Parish Register #1 - burials section today. I did manage to complete to January 1631. The transcription is very very difficult but I will continue tomorrow and hope to finish. There are six prints left to transcribe.

I had a query from a descendant of the Hinxman family. They are found at West Dean after the late 1600s but not there in the earlier register. I sent the requested baptism to the enquirer (Edward Hinxman baptized 30 December 1628). The record was a little earlier than thought - they were looking for 1635 and indeed there may be one in 1635 and I will see that at a later date unless I take the time to look tomorrow which I might. Edward was a fairly common name though in the Hinxman family at Andover.

I also met a new individual looking at the Jonathan Mead the Cooper I, II, and III family in Dutchess County, New York, She has written an article published in the NEHGR on Jonathan Cooper I. Her interest is strong and I sent her all of my husband's details just so that she would have them.

We had all our children home for dinner today and it was a busy time. The dogs loved the chicken treats after the meal was over.

Tomorrow I will continue working on the Andover Parish Registers to complete them. Then I will begin the Timberscombe Parish Registers plus I need to complete the Birmingham transcription at Family Search. Never a dull moment.

Andover Parish Registers - 23

I did not complete the Parish Registers today - it was just too busy. I did manage to transcribe as far as March 1627 which is a total of 1668 burials. There are a couple of interesting Blake burials that will assist me in my quest to solve some of the Blake lines at Andover. I think, at this moment in time, that the husband of Jone Blake, widow, whose will was probated in 1527, was either Robert or Richard Blake and that he was the first of that surname to live in the area of Andover. Where he was born is unknown but the postulation by others is that he was born near Calne Wiltshire and the descendant of Robert Blake and Avis Wallop. The Blake family of Wiltshire is definitely descended from Robert Blake and Avis Wallop. Possibly the Blake family of Somerset is also descended from the Blake family near Calne but I suspect that it is further back than published sources.

I wish that the individual who has tested at FT DNA and has a result that is I2a2 like my own paternal line would increase his markers. Although the match is only 8 on 12 one of these differences is likely a very personal one occurring in my paternal line. The other three are fast moving markers. Going to 37 markers might prove to be interesting but it might also show a big difference - hard to say!

Today I decided to houseclean the two bathrooms and that kept me quite busy as I washed literally everything! It is amazing the fresh spring scent that permeates a room after all of the curtains, rugs, etc. are hung outside to dry. It doesn't last long but the day after is quite lovely.

My husband and I spent a while working through the website of The Archives of Ontario. We have a project that will take us there in the fall and want to have all of our material ready to work on there. Our sessions at Salt Lake City showed us the real value of making long lists of potential items to look at. Although we have done this before for NEHGS it wasn't possible with NYGBS although soon will be when their collection is catologued by the NYPL.

Tomorrow I shall continue working on the Parish Registers and perhaps I will complete them. Unfortunately the writing has become quite difficult and the pages are somewhat chewed! But still the material that I can glean is very valuable. If completed then I will begin the Timberscombe Parish Registers with the thought of completing them over the next week of so. When completed I have to donate them to the OPC Somerset website, the FreeReg website and Family Search. I have the fiche of the original records as well.

Proofreading DNA study - 3

I completed my proofreading of the DNA study and spent a little time in organization. It is good to be finished and I will pass it on to my co-investigators. It has been a very interesting study. Since it will be published, I can not, of course, share it online.

I also got back to transcribing the Andover Parish Registers burial portion for the first register. I am up to September 1626 and 1594 entries. Another seven years to complete and then the first register will be complete.

It turns out that the LDS has supplied images for some of the Somerset parishes of which I am the online parish clerk. One of these is Timberscombe so I now have 36 scans to my fiche to work with but they are a good deal easier to read as I can blow them up to look for clarity. Ancestors of mine that lived at Timberscombe in Somerset included: Simon Moggridge, Grace Mogeridge, and Mary Vicary. I have the transcriptions by T. Stoate of the parish registers but it is always nice to look at them yourself to see if you can see something that he didn't. Plus I like to put the family lines together when it is possible.

Tomorrow I shall complete the Andover Parish Register for the burials and set that aside for a while. I will then begin the Timberscombe parish registers. I have also taken on transcription of the Birmingham Parish Records for FamilySearch. I have now done over 1200 records for Family Search. I may once again go back and do Free BMD after a year's absence. I found that reading from the old scans to proofread the work already done was really difficult. I need to have a feel for the names in particular areas to be of real help. I will try again to see if I can assist in completing this very fine task. I have entered more than 20,000 records into FreeBMD since I started.

Proofreading DNA study - 2

I continued proofreading the DNA study and I will finish it tomorrow. I decided to add in more data which meant backtracking and picking up the earlier data sets. I am all caught up now and just have 30 datasets left to proof. Listening to my daughter, I will think about collecting the data in a more sophisticated manner if indeed this extra information proves useful.

We watched the last two episodes of All Creatures Great and Small, Season II. I have Season III and IV on order but it will be awhile before I see them likely as I am #10 and #11 on the list of people waiting for them. This evening two episodes of JAG in Season III were enjoyed. We also went for a 2kilometre walk after dinner. I baked a chocolate cake today - the first in ages since before I injured my shoulder. I couldn't manage to do things like that for quite a while and got away from it. I had stewed up a pot of rhubarb and chocolate cake is so good with stewed rhubarb. I expect we will eat a lot of rhubarb this year :)

Tomorrow I will finish off the datasets for the DNA study. I want to get back to the Andover Parish Registers as I set them aside to work on the proofreading. I may still be able to complete the burial register of the 1st register by the weekend. Then I can start on the next register. I also need to make my list of wills to order from the Hampshire Record Office.

Proofreading DNA study

No parish register transcription today but I did managed to proofread another 15 entries plus I am adding four new columns (dated) that show total number of HVRI and HVRII matches plus the number at each level that have completed FGS testing. It is interesting as I record them and eventually I could build a table that would be a good reflection of testing.

Off to dinner at our childrens and visited with the dogs. Life is certainly very busy. Also managed to walk out to the point with my oldest daughter - we want to keep in training for our 10K each spring.

Tomorrow I shall work on the Parish Registers and continue the extraction and proofreading of data.

Andover Parish Registers - 23

Today was an incredibly busy day as we had a meeting in the morning to help out with a Genealogy Day Camp this summer. That was a couple of hours and then we picked up another 10 bags of topsoil for the garden.

Then home again and lunch. Then off to buy groceries and some proofreading. I managed to get through another 20 samples with just 75 left to go. I hope to finish by the end of the week. I also managed to do so some transcription of the Andover Parish Register #1 - burial portion. I have now completed to the end of 1620 or 1418 burials in the database. I expect that there will be around 2500 burials up to 1633.

We also ordered an item from the Shopping Channel for the first time. It is a film scanner/35 mm slide scanner. My husband has nearly scanned all of the negatives that he has taken in the last 43 years so wants to move on to the slides as we have about 15 years of slides although he always had them printed as well so we have the pictures.

The dogs came to see us for a little while today but it was raining so they couldn't run lose in the backyard or they would have been very muddy.

Tomorrow I hope to complete another 30 data sets proofreading. I would also like to complete up to 1625 in the Parish Register.