Moving

I rather think this next year will see us moving. That will be an interesting happening.

Will moving affect my genealogy work? Probably not very much. We will not travel as much which gives me even more time to do transcription and pursue genealogy!

Our neighbour next door has had a stroke. We have lived side by side for over 35 years and his wife passed away last winter. Change is in the air I suspect as their house will probably be sold as well. Time to move on. We have been in this house 35 years; longer than either of us has lived anywhere.


So moving is good news. It will mean more transcription.

Blake and Pincombe websites

Hopefully back to transcription soon. I am thinking about the Blake website which I plan to create over this summer. It will be a site to lodge information that people have collected and want to share on such a website. I will have family trees that people have sent to me and that I have put together. I am not that interested in castles, coats of arms and the other prestigious facts on the Blake family but I will include them where I have the information. I have collected most of the Blake Visitations and will put that information in text form but acquiring the CDs of these Visitations is a marvelous look at the families that lived around our Blake families in particular areas. I have purchased over time about 75 of the Visitation CDs - luckily for me a number of my families are in these particular volumes but my website will only look at the Blake information. I have become an active co-administrator of the Blake yDNA project and added some of my touches to the webpage displaying the results. More people testing will provide a more in depth study of the Blake family of the British Isles. For my own line I moved it from being an English line to being a British Isles line. My only close match is an individual with total Irish ancestry. Why my line would come to Andover in the late 1400s early 1500s is a mystery that I may one day solve or had they been there for even longer. Our haplogroup of I2a2b is most commonly found in the British Isles and the Upper Rhine. Consideration is being given to this particular haplogroup traveling to the British Isles during the Norman invasion. I have no oral history of the Blake family being with William the Conqueror and that remains to be investigated. Dr. Ken Nordvedt, on the other hand, shows I2a2b moving across Doggerland to present day northern England and into Ireland.

I may also create a Pincombe website but the lack of an effective yDNA study is keeping me from moving forward on this family line. The last Pincombe one name study researchers put the Pinkham and the Pincombe family together (and indeed the records in England do show these names used interchangeably on occasion). I would like to determine if this is a correct assumption before I share online the material that I acquired and that I have put together. My ancestor William Pincombe, who left his will in 1602 at East Buckland DEV, had seven sons of whom only three are traceable thus far. Initially my thought was that these seven sons were founding families in other areas but the publication on Genuki of earlier wills of the Pincombe family lets me now see that this Pincombe family was just a portion of the Pincombe families living in north Devon in the 1500s. Whether they all trace back to the father of Thomas Pencombe (father of William at East Buckland) remains to be seen. Thomas and Johane Pencombe had three sons and I am somewhat convinced that the original Pencombe who arrived about 1485 in North Devon at North Molton was the father of at least two sons - John and Thomas who may represent the founding lines of this family in Devon. Almost certainly this individual was a younger son of the Pencombe family at Pencombe Herefordshire.

Blake queries and gardening

I have had three Blake queries in the last little while and will prepare a blog on all of them with the material that I was able to draw out from their query and my searching (and material that I have on hand).

Gardening has preoccupied me this past month and limited my time spent on genealogy. Along with that I have arthritis in my right thumb which is a nuisance. It is greatly aided by knitting and knitting is something I have been doing quite a bit of lately as it turns out so that is a nice coincidence. I just completed a six month sweater in yellow and have just begun one in blue.

We have had a good deal of rain which has been a blessing but also has increased the lawn cutting and weeding of the gardens. Gardening is a never ending occupation I am convinced and not being particularly "green thumbed" it has always had a low priority with me but my husband enjoys his garden and I am helping him this year as he is able to do a great deal.

Hopefully I will be back to my wills and other posts in another couple of months. My next priority is working on the Blake website which will accommodate excel files that people might want to put up of their data to share and the material that I have transcribed will also go up on my webpage.

Poll Books and the Blake family

Thus far working on the flat file of the Blake family members who were found in the UK Poll Books which ancestry has lately added to their sites; the best results are for the Norfolk Blake family with the London Blake family also having good representation. In the case of the London entries there is often a street address attached to the name along with the occupation. Matching that up with wills  for these individuals is starting to flesh out the London Blake family. Some of them are descendant of the Hampshire Blake family and the modern day Blake that has roots traced back to these individuals in London would be an interesting candidate for yDNA testing of his Blake line. Our study is now up to 52 members although results are available thus far for only 37 members with several results in test mode. Looking at the results, the Blake lines deep ancestry is quite fascinating. There are 18 R1b results (in the British Isles one could anticipate that 75 to 80 % of males will test R1b), six I1 (in the British Isles approximately 15% of males are I1), I2a and I2b account for another 8 which is surprisingly high for this haplogroup (in the British Isles approximately 1 to 2 % of males are I2) and R1a1 five members and this haplogroup is most commonly found with respect to deep ancestry on the eastern side of the British Isles as it tends to be an Eastern European haplogroup including the Germanic peoples and into Scandinavia. Hence the Blake family thus far in testing has a very high incidence relatively speaking within the British Isles population of the I2 haplogroup which is of course very interesting to me as my line tests I2. However, I find that I am equally interested in the R1b, I1 and R1a haplogroups that are also appearing in the Blake families that do trace on paper back to the British Isles and those that feel strongly that their link back is to the British Isles and trace back to the early colonial days in the Americas.

I continue to work on the Routledge family documents and they are my highest priority with regard to transcription. I have completed the first page of a two page document and will continue with that today. Again it is an interesting document with links to John Rowtledge at Bewcastledale and his attempts (along with others) to have the boundaries of particular properties clearly defined and this is a time that the Commons were available for grazing. This is early in the reign of James I (of England and VI of Scotland). James was not fond of the families that lived in the so called Debatable Lands considering them to be outlaws. The first page was rather interesting once I got onto the rather elaborate writing and I hope that the second page has more information on the Routledge family. I still have several other documents on which I intend to work in the next week or so.

Congratulations to my husband as he will be awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal. His dedication to public service in so many fields has impressed me through the years and I am so very glad to see all of his work recognized in this way. The pacemaker has made his life so very much easier and we do spend part of each day ensuring that he gets plenty of healthful walking. Our gardens are looking good as this year we are both working away at them. Not too much in any one day but with his guidance my "non" green thumbs are certainly being more effective this year as I work with him. Although I helped my grandmother as a child in her garden and my grandfather in our garden that was many many years ago and I had forgotten 99% of what I had learned. This past year has certainly passed very quickly for me as I was trying to keep everything up but now as he grows stronger and stronger with the aid of the pacemaker we are working together on everything now.