Myself at 73 with my parents, grandparents

I let my hair grow long this past year and now that it is winter it is somewhat straighter than the summer when it tends to be a curly mass.

My family thinks I look like my mother as they remember my mother very well when she was in her 70s.

So this picture has my mother top left and myself top right. Her mother, my maternal grandmother, bottom left and myself bottom right. I can not see that I resemble my mother or my maternal grandmother. They have a larger nose and a squarer face. Their hair even in old age is not as gray as mine is. In all cases we are about 73 years of age.

The lower picture is of my paternal grandmother top left. She was only 64 when she passed away from a difficult illness so looks more aged than her 64 years likely. But she has the pointed chin and smaller nose which are also my facial features. My father is in the lower left corner and his ages in these two pictures are 78 and 88 years of age. His pictures at 73 were not quite as clear so I used later ones and indeed he looked pretty much the same throughout his later years. I have his gray hair which was a steely gray. I have his smaller nose but he has a more prominent chin than I do. I think he took after his father for his chin.

The DNA shows that I inherited quite a bit of Rawlings (my grandmother's maternal family) rather more so than my siblings. Plus the X chromosome which I inherited from my father came directly from his mother unchanged so there is always that possibility of inheriting rather more in this line because of that transfer of X DNA. My matches do rather bear that out in my case.

I have meant to do this for a while and decided to take advantage of my long hair of the moment but as it turns out everyone is mostly wearing shorter hair or pinned back!

Interesting in retrospect that I was named Elizabeth and my paternal grandmother's name was Bessie although her mother was Elizabeth Rawlings and her mother Elizabeth Lywood. My mother didn't want to give me a short form that was not so commonly used at that time so decided that if I was to be named after my grandmother than it would be the full name of Elizabeth rather than Bessie. Indeed I was never a Bessie, Elizabeth suited me much better!

Once again my living memory is my blog and it has assisted me many times when I remembered I had thought about something and there it was five or ten years ago. It is now ten years since I started my blog.

Seemed incomplete so decided to do two more pictures to include all of my grandparents and further back.

 This picture above has four generations of Pincombe men, in the top left corner my great great grandfather John Pincombe (I will add his wife Elizabeth Rew to another image), beside him on the top is my great grandfather William Robert Pincombe (I have his wife Grace Gray and will add her to another slide), bottom left is my grandfather (his wife Ellen Rosina Buller appears above in the first image), and then next to him my uncle William Edwin Pincombe. At first glance my chin looks similar to John Routledge but looking at it further I do not really think so.

 This next image is my father's side. Top left my great grandfather Edward Blake and his wife Maria Jane (Knight) Blake beside him. You can see my father's chin in these pictures. Lower left is my grandfather Samuel George Blake, then my father, then my grandmother Ida Bessie (Taylor) Blake aka Ada Bessie Cotterill Rawlings. I continue to think I mostly look like Bessie, my paternal grandmother.I had forgotten about this picture though and her jaw does appear a little broader than mine. This is one of her later pictures.

 This picture includes the wifes of John Pincombe (my 2x great grandfather) namely Elizabeth Rew (my 2x great grandmother) and the wife of William Robert Pincombe (my great grandfather) namely Grace Gray.

This last slide is the Rawlings family. Top row left is William Rawlings (my 2x great grandfather) and his wife Elizabeth Lywood (my 2x great grandmother). Below left is likely Elizabeth Rawlings but she is younger, I do not have an older picture of her and beside her is the last picture of my paternal grandmother. I think I may just be very right that I most resemble her with my somewhat pointed chin, smaller nose and perhaps heart shaped face but she herself doesn't really resemble her grandparents on her mother's side as these pictures are definitely of them.