Along with doing BritainsDNA Chromo2 which included both Fatherline and Motherline as well as All Your Ancestry (this last is still to come), I also did Gen2.0 from National Genographic DNA project and increased the Alleles from 67 to 111 for my Blake line. I am still awaiting the results from Gen2.0 (at 40% for a couple of weeks now) and the increase in alleles has just been batched at FT DNA for delivery mid January. This does appear to be the year for looking at the deep ancestry of my Blake yDNA and my mtDNA line following back through the mother line which on paper does not go back very far (my great grandmother Ellen Taylor died in 1897 at the age of 37 years and then family lore back another three generations to Mary Hudson baptized 1753 at Corley, Warwickshire but is this correct does tend to haunt me and so I have this broken line back before Ellen Taylor) but the mutations takes me back to the west coast of Scotland in the Blood of the Isles database and before that crossing Doggerland to prehistoric Britain and before that wintering at Ukraina during the last great ice age 15,000 years ago.
I started doing genealogy after the computer age had already entered into genealogical research. In particular, DNA was starting to become a useful tool for genealogical research and it was this idea that indeed using my own DNA I could look backwards through the mists of time and learn more about my lines because the paper trails for the most part will only take most people back to the mid 1500s if you are descended from the British as I am and perhaps a little further with the manor records and wills which includes my Blake line back into the late 1400s and perhaps a little earlier still as I get around to reading those ancient documents.
Watching my husband research his lines these past 45 years, I have marveled at his patience going through all those books and documents both paper and film. I used to look up items for him before our children arrived but I could never really get into doing my own lines. Knowing all the migration stories of my ancestors, knowing all their places of birth back a number of generations I just couldn't acquire the interest necessary to get me to do genealogy way back then.
But seeing the explosion in DNA suitable for genealogical discovery quite swung the balance with me and along with that the desire to follow that paper trail. So now I am an avid genealogist with 42 courses to my credit from the National Institute of Genealogical Studies in Methodology, British and Canadian Studies. A graduate in both British and Canadian Records along with Methodology in 2007 I look back these six years now and I am amazed at how valuable all that course work has been to me. Granted I could have just listened to the lists but the tools of genealogy, the methods in particular have proved absolutely invaluable to me as I hunted down elusive points in order to more clearly show the lines hidden by time.
Now into one name studies of my Blake (fatherline) and Pincombe (motherline) families, I can see the years ahead of me continuing to transcribe all of these myriad of documents that I have acquired by traveling, by suggesting that instead of buying me that item that you think I would really like buy me wills instead from the county record offices for Christmas! I have years and years worth of transcription already at my fingertips and as I become more deeply entrenched in my daily occupation of transcription I am slowly drawing away from any commitments that take me away from my beloved transcriptions. But occasionally through the email a document reaches me that quite catches my interest and I set aside my planned transcription in favour of tasting this new piece of information.
For me it is as much about who I am when I busily transcribe these documents maintained by my Church (I am Anglican or Church of England in Canada as it was known) as it is about the discovery of Blake or Pincombe and who they all were. I can feel and sense the power of God in all of this but particularly in the older wills where one first satisfied one's duty to God before all else. The depth of the belief that our ancestors had in God and Jesus Christ made their lives so much more meaningful to them.
Happy Thanksgiving to our American neighbours as they share around the table of family this evening.
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