Still writing

When I started my project the 12th of December 2015, I did not imagine that I would still be writing so enthusiastically by the beginning of June. I have almost completed my great grandparents and all their children (just working on my set of great grandparent's children). The Buller family has been a source of wonder for me. I spent hours and hours with my Grandmother Pincombe (nee Buller) and thinking back I did ask all the questions that one does usually ask a grandparents but she was expert at eluding my questions. I did learn somethings but mostly it was a huge brickwall that even now 13 years after I started doing my family tree I have not progressed (other than with the family lore that I did acquire from her) back before her mother with documented evidence. With her father I have been able to move back another two generations but there as well I am brickwalled. So now I am working on the children of my grandmother's siblings and there to I have many brickwalls because we have not kept in touch with those descendants. The two others who had children married in the United States and lived the rest of their lives there. My mother visited her aunts through the years and I have her stories to remind me but still there is a gap as I do not know my second cousins beyond their names.

As I was writing away I started to look at my own 900 page story and decided that I needed to footnote that and so I am busy working away on that footnoting for a few days which may turn into weeks as I had not yet worked my mother's letters into my story and she had kept my letters as well and so they too can be worked into my story. It is amazing being able to do that. Certainly at the time that I kept the letters I did not think of writing my story but then the years passed and amazingly I actually have grandchildren and so I wanted to put all of this information that I had collected into some sort of readable context. It has worked well and I am pleased with the result. It will be something for my daughters to read in their old age and perhaps my descendants if they so desire. But mostly it brings together the thousands and thousands of pictures that we have taken through the years.

I am persuading my husband to consider writing his life story and perhaps we will be able to work at that next winter. Time will tell.

My aim is to complete the three times great grandparents by fall and I did do the four times great grandparents as a 52 Ancestor Challenge in 2014 which will be very helpful when I write them up. Now writing this I realize that that may be the extent of my completion of writing up by the end of one year of writing. There is still so much left as I have managed to get back to 5x and 6x great grandparents in many lines and back as far as 14x great grandparents in my parent's surname line.

My 14x great grandparents on my Blake line were Robert Blake married to Maude Snell. Both of them left wills although Maude's will has gone missing apparently at the Winchester Archives in Hampshire england.

My 12x great grandparents on my Pincombe line are unnamed but their son Thomas Pencombe married Johane (unknown) and both left wills. Johane's will was probated at the PCC but Thomas' will was lost in the bombing of the Record Office at Exeter during WWII.

My project is likely going to taken another year beyond this year but I will be getting back into my one name studies as time passes. Already I am thinking about which set of wills to transcribe next.