Will of Valentine Blake 1615

This rather challenging will is still my focus for transcription and I have completed the body of the will but still working on a rather extensive list of names with amounts owed to Valentine who was clerk at Winchcombe Gloucester. The list should prove to be rather interesting.

Likely I will complete by Thursday or Friday given my new style of doing genealogy. I work away on the computer a few hours each day. I also do family reconstruction and I continue with the Blake family in Cornwall. I now have them on cards so that I can enter them into my legacy software and create a few charts for the family at Landrake and area.

The last five months of inactivity with regard to the computer has led me to new thinking on how I want to work on my genealogy and I decided that my strong interest in Blake will continue as well as Pincombe but I also want to get my work up to date on my other lines that I am studying and have study pages at The Surname Society. The Blake and Pincombe I continue with at the Guild of one-name studies.

Another project is to create a searchable database of all my records since they include many surnames other than my own due to the transcriptions that I have done of various parish records. This will eventually be available either inside The Surname Society or on my webpage depending on the value of such a resource within our Society.

The month of February is more or less planned in terms of work to accomplish. High on the agenda is my 52 week ancestor challenge and I am working on my 4x great grandparents and should have enough to write about 52 of the known 55. Perhaps a great breakthrough will occur and I will be able to definitely claim Thomas Taylor and Ellen Roberts as my great grandmother's parents. The parish registers for Birmingham are now online at Ancestry and I shall search each of them for a marriage for Edwin Denner Buller and Ellen Taylor. I can only think that their marriage, if available, did not get sent into the GRO. Doing the various marriage challenges has pointed out to me that some are missing.

Another ongoing project is scanning letters my mother wrote to me over a period of 27 years and I will write them all to a DVD eventually and give them to my family to enjoy through the years.

I still have a lot of books to read and time is set aside each day for reading.