Gardening, genealogy and MOOC

Time slips by so quickly in the spring/summer with gardening and then I helped my husband with a couple of wills and became somewhat bogged down with one of my own.

It is an interesting will for Philip Blake who lived at Penquite in Landrake, Cornwall. I have found quite a bit of information but wanted to try and take him back in time. He wrote his will ion 1808 and I am able to likely take him back to the early 1700s with his likely father Richard Blake who married a Mrs. Elizabeth Blake 28 Sep 1732 at Landrake.

The Foote wills were of interest to my husband so we transcribed the two oldest ones 1558 and 1608 for John Foote and Robert Foote (his son) respectively. It was the son of Robert Foote Nathaniel who was an emigrant to the Americas in the 1630s and founded the Foote line there. We attended a Foote family reunion in South Burlington where we met a number of descendants of Nathaniel and hence cousins to my husband. We have toured Wethersfield Connecticuit where Nathaniel lived and will do that again one of these days. He was one of the early settlers there.

My husband's blog:

http://americancanadianancestors.blogspot.ca/2013/06/will-of-robert-foote-ueoman-england.html

http://americancanadianancestors.blogspot.ca/2013/06/will-of-john-foote-tallow-chandler.html

I always find my husband's genealogy fascinating because 90% of his people were here by the mid 1600s in the American colonies. He has a few late comers with one set of his great grandparents having come directly from Pomerania (Eastern Germany/Western Poland) in the mid 1800s and one set of his 3x great grandparents arrived with his 2x great grandmother Mary Ann Abbs in Ontario (East Gwillimbury) by 1833 as their last child was born here and the second last born in England so fairly easy to date that arrival. They were from Norfolk, England. Having that length of American genealogical history though is a challenge. The records are often sparse and in the case of his Kipp 2x great grandfather we have not yet found his paper trail back to the Kip family of New Amsterdam/New York but his yDNA takes him back. Another success story for yDNA.

Also there is a MOOC for Irish genealogy which I am trying to work away at. An interesting way to learn and I must try to get back to that study.