Sorting Day

 Today is a sorting day. I have five stacks of paper that I need to go through and discard or save what I need to do the Income Tax and otherwise run the house. I just didn't want to think about any of that the last nine months. I had everything organized to pay all the bills and keep everything going so looking at the paperwork was something that I just didn't do. Mostly it is Edward's paperwork as he did keep everything and probably I will for a while do the same. But some paperwork can go and it will. But in actual fact it will just go into yet another bin of paper that I will eventually go through one more time next summer sometime. There is a lot of genealogy stuff of Edwards that will go to the Library along with the rest of the journals. I have just let them collect this past six months. Almost all of the journals are now finished as Edward paid them yearly without renewals set up. But still a couple are coming and he may have been a life member and I need to check that and let the individual groups know. 

Yesterday saw the cleaning finished which was very nice so that we now have four days without dust as I call it. A dust free atmosphere is not possible but lessening it makes the living much better I think. 

I have not accomplished anything particularly with my genealogy. There just always seems to be other things to do at the moment but tomorrow I will work on the H11 Newsletter and I am very early doing that as usually it is closer to the end of the month. No new large matches but that is all caught up now for a while. Generally I have five to ten matches a week that go into my Current Work waiting to be entered into my system. Yesterday there was an interesting match on Ancestry which was quite large compared to his likely sister. Still not sure where they match as the shared matches consist of just one person also matching at the same level as the sister and no others. But they all match all four of us on Ancestry. Now that you can only view easily fourth cousin and up readily in the matching that tool is a little less useful but overall Ancestry is interesting. Rarely now does anyone put their match up on Gedmatch from Ancestry that matches us. But I am starting to move past that just a little as I have a lot of good matches that have let the phasing be a more completed task. I still have little areas here and there but for the most part it does look like I have captured the DNA into two sets of chromosomes that were passed to my parents. Since we do not have any first cousins I will have more difficulty going back to the great grandparents and hence creating the DNA that passed from them to my grandparents, their children. 

I do find it interesting doing grandparent phasing I must admit. If I ever did win the lottery I would try to have the DNA of all of my grandparents done as they were all casket burials and that potentially could be possible although do not know the legality of it all. All four of my grandparents are buried at Woodland Cemetery in London, Ontario in two lots - one Blake and one Pincombe. I wonder if people are doing that actually or does it sound too macabre. It is very respectful I think as it gives you a part of your grandparents that lasts forever and becomes part of your family history passing down from generation to generation. My grandfather used to like to recite the names of his Blake ancestors (and sometimes although I can not remember it clearly) he talked about his Knight ancestors - I can remember him talking about his grandfather Samuel Knight (he was named after him) and even the father of Samuel whose name I did not retain but now know to be Ellis Knight. He said that they had a baker's dozen of children (i.e. 13 children) and that did stick and I did find 13 children! He knew a lot about location as well but I only retained Blandford Forum as it was such an unusual name but Turnworth where Samuel Knight lived is very close by and my great grandmother Maria Jane Knight was born there. 

Speaking of Maria Jane Knight I once again failed to find her death registration. I think I have a dozen Maria Blake death registrations now. My father used to say that after his grandfather Blake died Maria lived with each of her children for different parts of the year for quite a while. She didn't want to come to Canada so they sent some money for her instead. She had a number of children but two died young, two daughters died in childbirth, one son died in his early twenties. one moved to South Africa and two moved to Canada. That left four and the eldest daughter was raised by her Knight grandparents at Turnworth (Louisa) where she married, the eldest son John lived at Eastleigh, Sarah the youngest daughter lived at Upper Clatford and Thomas the youngest son lived at Dorchester. The 1921 census may be the answer and would have been cheaper than buying the death registration! I shouldn't be so stubborn and keep thinking it must be this one or that one! I must try the census and see what I can find as all four of them will be there. Perhaps that will be a task today in between sorting.