Progress on the Research Room

We managed to do quite a bit on the structural part of the Research Room. Just have a couple more pieces of furniture to move in; the computer, the scanner and then we can start organizing the boxes into the room. I think another couple of weeks and I might even be able to start to work on the research boxes. 

It is a slow process to rework your life that for 54.5 years was a twosome working together and raising two children. Ten years ago I spent half of my time assisting Edward with his research organization but his one year illness that eventually resulted in the pacemaker being inserted created a change in our lives in that he rested more and I had more time to devote to my one-name studies plus my interest in DNA was very much taking over my projects and redirecting them away from accumulation of family tree type information. My younger sister had started into genealogy around 2007 and rapidly outstripped the growth of my tree which still remains at a rather low number compared to her tree which is about five times as large or more; haven't looked for a little while. 

The garden has suffered the most this year as I just have not had the time to really work at it. Next year it will be smaller and perhaps I will have someone come in and spread fresh earth and grass seed. It does really need that once again. Our neighbours have a more relaxed attitude towards grass and we are starting to acquire more wild plants in the lawn than was there when both Edward and I would be out there digging out dandelions, stinging nettle, bladderwort, daisies, etc etc. I discovered during one of the wind storms that some quite large branches came down from the maple tree last week and so we spent a couple of hours breaking all of that up to go with the garbage pickup on Saturday. It never ends really looking after a garden until winter. Another reason to love winter for sure! 

I now have the luxury of time which has not been the case these many years. In my mid teens I became interested in my parent's surnames. My grandfather Blake had lived with us and did tell me that there must be a number of Blake lines because his line was in England, he believed, before the Norman Conquest. DNA has certainly proven that to be an accurate statement about his Blake line at or near to Andover Hampshire England. Perhaps it was the First Nations peoples mentioning that they had always lived in a particular area that rekindled that thought in my mind in 2011. When you are very ancient to a line then thousands of years pass one would feel that you had always been in that place which was my grandfather's interpretation of his Blake family. Finding them in that place in the records back into the early 1300s was an eye opener for me. I remember going to the history section of the library in my mid teens (I did tend to haunt libraries in my youth) and finding write ups on the Blake surname and they did not match what he had said with regard to the Norman Conquest and his Blake line. I actually do not find any Blake names associated with the Norman Conquest as I have mentioned in my blog the le Blak name did come from Rouen Normandy but not until the 1270s and this Richard le Blak came as a merchant wanting to set up a wool market in England. Pincombe was not known to me in terms of deep ancestry other than what my mother remembered her father saying and interestingly enough her father had died when she was eight (my Blake grandfather died when I was eight) so that I did believe what my mother remembered about her Pincombe line. She did have a good memory for the facts as it turned out I was able to readily trace our Pincombe line back to the 1480s at North Molton, Devon. I have hypothesized that this family came from Pencombe Hertfordshire with Lord de la Zouch after the Battle of Bosworth Field where, it would appear they supported Richard III, given that Lord de la Zouch was attainted following the Battle by Henry VII the victor. So I continue with those one-name studies which I took on in 2007 for Pincombe and in 2011 for Blake. Genealogy itself does not interest me that much other than it is a tool for looking backwards in family lines but the tracing of cousins is not high on my agenda unless I am working with DNA and wanting to prove a particular line in a particular place and then I do get into genealogy although tend to have a look at my sister's tree first!