Started watching Ancient Apocalypse which is on Netflix and narrated by Graham Hancock. He is not an archaeologist; nor is he a pure scientist (physics, chemistry or biology) which I understood when I started to watch the series. His background is a sociology degree. His travels to ancient ruins is breathtaking having gone to the Mayan ruins at Tulum in Mexico, Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England, Skara Brae on the Orkneys and right here in Newfoundland L'Anse aux Meadows and many of the ruins in Rome, Italy along with views of Vatican City and other historic spots. As a child I loved to look at the skies and dream all those dreams of space travel and was enthralled with the first space ride of Yuri Gagarin. But I like it when one gets to visit all of these architectural treasures via Netflix (or any other system that carries such interesting documentaries) and listening to the narrator is also part of the enjoyment whether you agree with him or not I find it interesting to listen to his collections of information although he admits that archaeologists are not in agreement with him. He does bring up interesting details like carbon dating that has not been done on some of these ancient marvels. So I will watch all eight of the episodes and enjoy the scenery and think about his comments.
Mostly though I am deeply immersed in my own extraneous thinking about the time period in English history that mostly captivates me 1300 to 1600 when my Pincombe and Buller (and many other lines that I trace back to but these are my parent's surnames) ancients were alive and living in a fairly well known and fixed area in the British Isles - namely my Pincombe family in the South Molton Hundred (mostly North Molton, Filleigh and East Buckland 1485 on) and my Blake family at Knights Enham, Penton Mewsey and Andover in the Andover Hundred (1200 on). It completely distracts me looking at these early records and time is lost to me in the course of a day when I am working on my research.
Today I must work on the Pincombe Newsletter. I have mostly put it together; I just need to organize it and blend all the thoughts to make it easier to read. I am writing about Protestation Returns. When I was a newbie and shortly after that time (I became a newbie to genealogical research in 2003) in 2008 we went to Salt Lake City where I was anxious to look at a whole lot of material and in actual fact did not leave the British Isles floor until Edward came and got me each day to go and eat. I was mesmerized by all the material that was at my fingertips and I had over 200 individual items that I wanted to look at some of which could be done in minutes and others particularly published books by Stoates would take me hours. But I was a newbie and once I had looked in the general area of North Molton and the roads coming in and out to various nearby villages I did not pursue the other Pincombes in Devon nor did I find all the name derivations that had arisen because my mind was still thinking in terms of the spellings which I had learned as a child particularly for Pincombe. Hence I was very excited to find these documents now online and so the desire to once again go through all of the Devon records arose and I followed the desire. This next newsletter will bear the results of that research.
Life can be strange really in terms of how I spend my time now. Little did I realize way back in 1962 when I wrote to Neil Bartlett who reported the first preparation of a xenon-containing compound in Proceedings of the Chemical Society and he replied with a copy of his paper and some advice for a person who wanted to study chemistry that I would not actually end up doing research in Chemistry but at the time I wanted to do my degree in Chemistry (went to UWO in 1963) and then go into medicine and then go to Africa as a medical missionary. Well as it turned out I did not go into medicine nor did I go to Africa but that is a long time ago. However, the desire to do research has always been in my blood and my cousin's need for a profile and the availability of testing one's DNA to look at one's ancient history came together as I was headed towards retirement and I was drawn into genealogy having watched Edward research his family for all of our married life. I just never could get into it before then. I needed something tangible that I could see to make me believe that I could find my ancestral line and DNA certainly was a path that could and does actually lead me back in time.
And of course my annoyance at particular happenings around the world also occupy my blog these days. Part of it is because I manage the H11 mt DNA group at FT DNA and probably 80% of my members are from Eastern Europe. Since my readers especially include members from Ukraine and Russia I felt it was important that I stop publishing my newsletter as a protest to Russia for invading Ukraine and killing their blood cousins and to inform just what Russia was doing in Ukraine and the huge lies that they were telling the Russian people. So I have done and continue doing that although I rather think the Russian people are now aware and many have fled and those who stay may or may not support this war and it generally looks like a lot do not - for one thing they do not want their sons killed uselessly in this war as they have no equipment and I suspect the food is pretty poor as well.
On to the day and it is Sunday so I shall go to Church as well - a wonderful online Service because I am old and it works better for me to do that.
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