BIFHSGO

The British Isles Family History Group of the Greater Ottawa Area met today at Library and Archives Canada. We do not always make it to the meetings but did do so today. An excellent talk by Lesley Anderson on the family tree portion of Ancestry. As subscribers to Ancestry, we have ten trees online between my husband and myself. We have been using this feature of Ancestry for about five years now and it is extremely handy. All of our trees are private thus far. I am still proving lines and do not wish to put them up until I am positive they are correct. There is too much out there that is incorrect. However, as Lesley mentioned one can access the individual members of the tree and write to you and I receive a number of contacts sometimes daily for one or the other of these trees. There were a few features of the trees that we have not been aware of and Lesley's lecture certainly revealed them to us and we will make use of them. Especially though I like to use the ability of Ancestry's search engines to find hints. Some of them are quite exceptional and we actually found one of Ed's great grandmothers on a passenger list that was sent to us as a hint by ancestry. I really wouldn't want to do genealogy without them to be honest. I also subscribe to Find My Past and feel the same way about their databases. I am always finding some new bit of information there.

The talk was also quite excellent and the speaker managed to bring home to me my sad neglect of Canadian history. On some parts of Canadian History I am extremely knowledgeable but his talk on Sir William Dawson the President of McGill University really brought it home to me how little I know about some of the early members of the natural science community in Canada. I must remedy that.  I love to read actually and shall start to do a little more on Canadian history.

I continue proofreading the Upper Clatford Parish Register transcriptions. I am about one quarter of the way through the baptisms. I can not estimate yet how long it will actually take me to complete the proofreading but it is moving along steadily. I shall try to do at least four hours a day to complete the project in a reasonable time interval.

I worked on my webpage today as well. I wanted to add in the one name study for the Blake family and upload the Penton Mewsey parish register transcription. I also feel confident now with my ancestry back to Nicholas. The Andover parish registers recording John Blake (son of William Blake) baptized at Penton but entered in the Andover register (possibly because the priest at Penton was not available - not sure of that) and then later the grandson of John (Thomas b 1709 Andover) is listed as being of the parish of Penton when he marries Ann Carter at Penton Mewsey in 1728. Thomas' mother was widowed in 1714 and family lore tells me that this family lived in a cottage at Foxcott (Mary (Spring) Blake and her only son Thomas). Thomas lives at Andover though as an adult as both of Thomas and Ann's children are baptized at Andover. However, the younger boy Thomas (baptized 1834; buried 1834) is buried at Penton Mewsey two days after his mother was buried.

I also worked on the Blake Profile for the one name study. I wanted to add in the details that I have online. I need to work on my section of the Blake Newsletter as well and get that submitted to Barrie Blake to put up 1st of April. I am going to do a list of Blake books - I have a number of them and I have found a few more online that I have also seen. The idea is to make the Newsletter somewhat general so as to attract as many Blake readers as possible. I think it will take awhile to get the project going but already I have managed to put together the years from 1943 to 1951 for the marriages on Free BMD. The next action will be to extract the children of these marriages and then using the census attempt to put these families back together working backwards. The names of the mother are available from 1911 on and the census is available from 1841 to 1911. It sounds doable when one contemplates it and we shall see how it works in practice. I already have a fair amount of knowledge for my Blake line at Upper Clatford. Joseph Blake was the only Blake there and only Thomas remained at Upper Clatford (his older brother William lived at Andover). As one looks at the census most Blakes in the census at Upper Clatford descend from Thomas Blake and Sarah Coleman.