Occasionally I have these days when I look at the number of hours that I put in at my desk top computer and wonder why I am doing this particular topic. The first 58 years of my life I had no interest in genealogy. There was this sort of interest in my parent's surnames in my teen years but I never really pursued it beyond looking in the local library at some books that talked about surnames of English origin. There wasn't a great deal there for Pincombe for sure but more for Blake. It looked quite comprehensive at the time and I enjoyed reading it and then set it down and never actually thought about it again until 2003 when my cousin George DeKay approached me and asked me to write a Pincombe Profile for the Westminster-Delaware History books that he was editing. He said that he had 40 orphaned surnames of early settlers and would appreciate it if I would take on the Pincombe one. It did take a little more than that as he basically said when I wrote to say I did not do genealogy that one of my cousins would do it but he thought that my grandfather owned a grocery store on Wharncliffe Road. That just happened to be my uncle (my mother's brother) and their father had been a farmer on the Second Concession. I just felt that it needed to be right. My mother had died the year before (2002) and I think the two just merged for me in a second as I knew that she would have wanted it to be right and so I assumed her persona so to speak and took on the project which she would have done had she been still living. I never really analyzed it before actually beyond George convincing me.
And so I began but not before getting George to promise to get my cousins together with me to work on the story. Since my line lived in the City; no longer on the farms that the Pincombe family owned in that area I thought that we should mostly stick to stories about them (plus they still carried the surname; mine was Blake). I think they liked that actually and our meeting was so very helpful. Plus George knew my half second cousins and they had all the picture albums from the Pincombe family and he managed to borrow them and I scanned the three large albums on a weekend and returned them to George. That was a game changer in some ways. I had a lot of pictures that at first I did not recognize but gradually as I looked at them I realized they were pictures of my grandparents together which I had never seen before. It was neat having pictures of my grandmother with her husband because he died when my mother was just eight years of age.
Am I actually doing all this work for myself? Probably not actually. I do not have a lot of interest in genealogy from the standpoint of finding and knowing cousins. It is always exciting to discover a DNA match and that does intrigue me. We inherit so little between even 2nd cousins that finding fourth and fifth cousins and knowing that the DNA share that we have has come down to both of us from an ancient grandparent totally unknown to myself other than a name. But doing genealogy means that on occasion you might get a picture of an ancestor. That actually hasn't happened to me yet but I am always hopeful. I am the one with many pictures constantly sharing them about. Fortunately I did recall from my childhood days the pictures that my grandparents showed to me so for the most part I can determine who is in the pictures and all that was done long ago now and I gave the originals to my younger sister who is much keener on genealogy than I am.
Then the other thought that does spur me onward is the same one that I had when my husband and I first married and he spent hours on his family tree. The work would all be done for our children and so that still stands. At some point in the future there may be a grandchild who is interested in genealogy and they will have all of this material for a start on their own voyage backwards into time and I will have prepared that for them on behalf of my family because that grandchild may be several greats removed from me and they will look at me as one of many 3x great grandparents perhaps but will have a lot of knowledge on the lines that came down to me and not so far to get to them then. No one had done any research I thought originally when I started into this but along the way I did discover books that were written and which I am now revising over time so that what I have found can be included and will bring the book up to date. The original book will include all of the information that I have to date but the published book will have a cut off in the early 1900s.
Wow that was a long thought for first thing for sure.
Always in the back of my mind is thinking about the Ukraine and the Russian invasion. I can remember my mother talking about sitting and waiting before World War II wondering what would happen. She always said that was the longest part. That the War years themselves went quickly but waiting for that strike that would set the war path was a long wait even though in days it was probably not all that long when I look at the history of it all.
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