Essex now complete and moving on to Gloucestershire

Essex marriages 1837 to the early 1960s now complete (as far as I am able) and moving on to Gloucestershire. There are over one thousand Blake marriages in Gloucestershire and I am interested to know if this will be flow into Gloucester from Somerset and Devon and Wiltshire or is it flow down from the upper midlands which is primarily Irish Blake families. It could also be a mixture of Irish/Welsh/Scot and English Blake families. As I move backwards into the early 1800s and the 1700s I will have a clearer picture but first the enormous task of the 1800s post 1837 and 1900s to examine and graph. That process has now begun as I started an excel file that will include all the Blake marriages in England by Registration District. This file will be less than 30,000 but the exact number is still unknown to me as there were duplicates in Free BMD and there were a small number of misplaced items although in the long run these do count in the total.

A milestone today as I celebrate my 67th birthday. Each day in our life is a gift of Almighty God and it is exactly 67 years to the day as I was born on a Sunday at noon so just a little past the 67 year mark now at 4:14 p.m. EDT. We spent the last couple of hours cleaning up the yard and that is an enormous task that will occupy us for a good month or so yet. We accomplished a great deal this summer although still have more leveling of patio brick stones to do and lots of painting outside. Probably spring will see us doing that unless we have a few nice days to work on the stones. But soon my hours will be directed towards transcription, preparation of Blake flat files to work on my one name study and some time on my Pincombe one name study.

I need to advertise the two yDNA studies that most interest me with regard to my families - Blake and Pincombe. I think that perhaps a write up on these families in the journals where these families lived might be a good plan and I shall look into that. I could also submit an article to the Guild of One Name Studies journal. Although I did not want to get involved in writing articles I need to reach members of the family in England and I do not want to send them letters directly. Although perhaps in time I might feel differently about that. It just seems a little intrusive but in reality probably really isn't. I am providing them with an opportunity to look at their family lines in a deep ancestral way and the cost of yDNA testing is not really all that expensive. If I could afford to set up 100 tests for anyone with a proven paper line back to particular ancestors I would like to do that but it will only happen if I win the lottery!

I believe I will try to get back to transcription of wills starting tomorrow and it will be Blake wills once again and I am still working on Hampshire wills.