Lately, I have been thinking about all this genealogy I have been doing the past ten years. Perhaps it is a one decade thing that one would think back and analyze progress in whatever you are doing.
Along with thinking about progress, I started to think about my one name studies and what I was actually doing.
The Pincombe one name study has ground to a halt somewhat as I have reached a rather perplexing stage. The Pinkham yDNA results from individuals with paper trails back to the 1600s and the one result I have from a 5th cousin do not match (this individual did not join the project nor does he respond to emails but the details which he placed on ysearch determine him to be my 5th cousin). They do not even come close. The one belongs to R-M269 and the two Pinkham themselves do not match with one being I-M170 and the other I-M223. The one Pinkham has traced his line back and believes there may have been an adoption so that is perhaps explained. Nevertheless the other Pinkham result has a paper trail back to the 1600s. I can trace Pincombe/Pencombe back to the 1400s. The original researchers (one American and one British) of this one name study (I inherited it) had put the Pincombe and Pinkham families together on a number of charts showing these names to be quite interchangeable. This actually never occurs in my lines in England (they are always Pincombe/Pincomb/Pencomb). So what have I accomplished in my eight years on the Pincombe family? I do have a number of trees but they do not link. I do have quite a bit of information on the North Molton/South Molton/Bishops Nympton Pincombe family. I have some on the Barnstaple/Bideford Pincombe family and I have 14 charts put together by the earlier researchers. I have collected all the BMDs for the Pincombe family in Free BMD and I have collected a lot of the census material. I transcribed a number of registers and have all of that information for Pincombe. Still to do Rose Ash, Merton, North Molton and South Molton but I do own the fiche and have extracted Pincombe information. If I were starting this study from scratch would I have put the Pincombe and Pinkham families together? Both of the earlier researchers had the surname Pinkham and could this have perhaps influenced their thoughts on linking these two families as having a common ancestry? Pincombe/Pinkham is a singleton name of that I am quite convinced. Fortunately my mother knew her family line back a long ways which was exceedingly helpful when I discovered that the chart held at the Society of Genealogists as part of the original Pincombe/Pinkham one name study was incorrect for my family line. I now have all the documents taking this line back at Bishops Nympton to the late 1500s and the wills of the Pincombe family let me link back to the late 1400s when the Visitation of Devon 1620 tells me that this line arrived at North Molton in 1485 and my suspicion is that they were from Herefordshire and the parish of Pencombe there. Linking the Thomas Pencombe in those records with the Pencombe who came to North Molton still remains to be done.
So my legacy in the Pincombe one name study may be a somewhat cloudy one - I appear to be disconnecting the earlier work. The question to my mind is should I do that? The names Pincombe and Pinkham have been used interchangeably on this side of the Atlantic. My great grandfather's death obit shows him as a Pinkham. Sometimes the census also showed that spelling and certainly that item as an error passed down in the family as they were quite horrified to be mispelled! I suspect my mother could spell her name almost as her first word so keen was this family on having their name spelled correctly! I want to try to move forward once again with this study but I think I need to change the focus in my mind. I suspect I need to look at the early records once again and decide if indeed this study must expand to include Tingcomb and other variants but I do not want to lose sight of my earlier goal to record the Pincombe family as I know it.
So what is my legacy to this study? I have transcribed all of the wills and there are not that many. I have collected all the BMDs and linked them into family groups for the most part. I need to collect all the earlier baptismal/marriage/burial records. I need to record the tax records that I have collected and will blog on them. They are only really helpful for my lines and the Barnstaple/Bideford lines. I need to construct family trees and may do a few interchanged with Blake family trees once I select a day of the week to do family tree reconstruction (probably Saturday). Monday has been reserved for my Ancestor a week (working on my 4x great grandparents - Blake, King, Coleman, Pearce, Farmer, unknown, Lambden, Sarah (unknown), Knight, Ellis, Knight, Vincent, Butt, Durnford, Arnold, Molton, Cotterel, Bartlett, Alderman, Ann (unknown), Sherwood, unknown, Habberfield, Collings, Rawlings, Tanner, Dove, Morgan, Lywood, Canham, unknown, Peck, Pincombe, Charley, Rowcliffe, Pearse, Rew, Moggridge, Siderfin, Kent, Gray, Hilton, Cobb, Sproxton, Routledge, Tweddle, Routledge, Routledge, (unknown) Buller, unknown, Beard, Hemsley, Welch, Brockhouse, Cheatle, Woodcock, unknown Taylor, unknown, Harborne, Lewis, Roberts, Croxall, Lawley, unknown - with only 49 known and 5 possibles. My tree can be seen to have pedigree collapse as I have a few second cousin marriages and indeed there are two Knights and three Routledges. Further back I have two Carters and two Blakes.
But again I wonder what will be my Legacy to the Pincombe one name study. It has not yet congealed in my mind. I think it will come with time. Certainly I have collected a lot of pictures for my line and perhaps that will be my legacy to see that my line is correct in the whole scheme of things. When I visited the Society of Genealogists they were unable to locate the large charts of which copies were sent to me a while ago. That has jogged my memory and I will send them electronic images of the charts. Do I change the one that is wrong? I need to think about that. Having things in print is a really dicey thing when the information is incorrect. I am tempted to make the change and record it as such on the chart before I send it back. But I may wait to do that until I have all of my charts completed. A slow and tedious process that has already been six years in the process. So perhaps I have seen my legacy, correct what I have found to be incorrect. Add to the existing charts and let a future researcher take up the mantle and determine the roots of Pincombe and Pinkham and the other possible derivatives of these two surnames. But in the meantime I shall pursue the connection between Pencombe in Devon in 1485 and Thomas Pencombe in Bromyord near Pencombe, Herefordshire found on the Calendar of Patent Rolls in 1395:
1395 20 May Westminster (membrane 5)
Licence, for 100 s. paid in the hanaper by Philip Webbe, chaplain of a
chantry of St. Mary in the parish church of Bromyord, for the alienation
in mortmain by John Falke of a messuage in Bromyord, and by John
Hunte or another there, and by Thomas Pencombe and Robert Stanford
of five messuages and half an acre of meadow in the same place, not held in
chief, to the said chaplain and his successors, in aid of their maintenance.
18 Richard II, volume 5, page 582
Bromyord is 4 miles ENE of Pencombe.
I have not purposely left the Blake one name study to the end but it always seems better to write about Pincombe first because I feel more successful with Blake even though I have barely scratched the surface with this great old family name. And it is an old name. I can find it in the 1200s and hope to discover more about this surname in that time period and earlier. It would be exciting to discover the original carrier of the surname in each of the known Blake lines in the Blake yDNA study. That is my focus; I continue to collect modern data on the Blake family and will be doing family trees but my deep focus is backwards in time to the originators of each of the distinct Blake lines. One is already known - Richard Caddell aka Blake - and I will include part of his tree as well but it will be from Martin Blake's well known two volume set on the Galway Blake family. Was Richard le Blak (merchant from Rouen, Normandy applying to go to market in 1274) the founder of the Blake family at Calne? That will be carefully looked at on the day that I do his tree which has been created by the College of Arms back in 1690 with additions up to 1740. Was the founder of my line at Andover John le Blake or Roger le Blake - who were they? They lived in the 1200s as well but in the Andover area.
My legacy to the Blake family will definitely be the transcription of wills; as many as I am able to do before I set aside my key board which may be much longer than I can even imagine. I tend to work on a ten year plan in that regard. I thought I would do genealogy for ten years and as that period of time has now come and gone I am still busy at the keyboard and thinking that another ten years of genealogy seems like a reasonable way to pursue my retirement. But I would like to enhance that legacy somewhat with the addition of family trees with documentation to prove the connecting lines. The other part of the legacy will be the accumulation of data in excel spread sheets of the material that I am unable to link together along with the material that is linked together. I like colours and as I link people into the trees I believe I shall colour them and then label their line in the file with the family tree number. Green means that they are in a tree and black means they are not yet. Red will mean I have a query about that individual in my mind and perhaps I shall use purple for queries that people send to me about individual Blake members where I am given data. Now what to do with these family trees that I produce? I think again I should put them into electronic books and eventually put that material up on InternetArchive as well if they do so permit. That way I can readily include the source. As more and more data comes online finding those sources is going to be easier and easier.
I will end all this thought on Legacies and one name studies with my still awesome finding. I knew that my great grandfather Buller had served in the Army during the 1870s/1880s (not after 1885) and had been injured in the leg as he walked with a limp (and cane in later life). But I could not find any information for him in the National Archives (UK) website, I hired a researcher to check out records for my great grandfather but he was unable to locate anything. Then Find My Past moved to their new search engine and moved me over to that new search engine page. Somewhat absentmindedly I searched on Edwin Denner Buller and wow there he was on a discharge register from Chelsea in 1882. Probably injured during the first Boer War and can look into that more when we are next at Kew but family lore had been clarified. Although the Find My Past website can be somewhat annoying as I liked the lists that were produced earlier, I am willing to wait while they work through their changes and improve the output. The gift of that record will keep me firmly attached to that record set for quite a while. I have acquired a lot of information from Find My Past anyway and I am willing to wait out the change.
My third project, and I think it will be Wednesdays when I do this particular one, will be looking at the 3x great grandparents of our daughter and son in law. I had written 4x earlier but I think I will concentrate on the 3x great grandparents. That is 64 individuals (32 are known on my son in law's side, on my husband's side all 16 are known and on my side 14 are known and 2 are possibles) and includes a lot of varied ancestry - our son in law's ancestry which is mostly French Canadian and French before that with a small number of other European nationalities including two English; mine which is English (from English counties only), and my husband which is mostly early Colonial America (Dutch, French Huguenot, Germanic, and English) with German and English later to Canada in the 1800s. This gives me a chance to look again at the French Canadian ancestry and gives some more attention to my husband's ancestry although he also blogs on his research. Since I will also be working on my 4x great grandparents and this Wednesday study will look at my 16 2x great grandparents, I will concentrate on proving and extending the knowledge of the 2x and 3x great grandparents for my lines. My great grandparents can all be found on my website:
http://www.kipp-blake-families.ca/elizabethmain.htm
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