BIFHSGO Meeting

I shall attempt to attend the meetings of the BIFHSGO (British Isles Family History Society of the Greater Ottawa area) group this year. I have been a member since the beginning of this group. Not sure why I made that decision but I was intrigued by the idea that British Heritage was important enough to start an active group, although my husband was an avid genealogist, I was not convinced that one can actually put together one's family tree accurately although did have the feeling that DNA might one day be useful in that regard but this was not yet the time although there were snippets of conversation that could lead one to think we were heading that way. My husband, who had told me about the forming of the group, was very much in agreement given that he did know he had at least one British ancestor - his 2x great grandmother Mary Ann Abbs who had emigrated to Canada with her family in the 1830s and married John Link. They were buried in the Christian Cemetery at Falkland. At this time he was unaware of his huge Dissident English ancestry from the early days of the American Colonies.

January nearly half way through and our fresh fall of 30 centimetres of snow will make cross country and downhill skiing the place to be for a while. At minus 15 degrees celsius I may not do that but time will tell; perhaps a short run. 

I met a new cousin (probably pretty distant) but his email started an avalanche of work on my part as I relooked at the Pinkham derivative of the surname Pincombe. I have always been somewhat ambivalent that this derivative had stemmed from the Pincombe family even though one group of this family started using this spelling in the mid 1700s in North Devon. It seemed strange to go from Pencombe to Pincombe to Pinkham in a couple of hundred years but I am not that familiar with the dialects that existed in North Devon in this time period. It was often the local priest that ended up changing the spelling of this surname in the records but most of the early Pencombe/Pincombe family members appeared to be able to write so was surprising. However, as this family moved out from North Molton where they are first found in 1485 in Devon the prosperity level of the family did decline and perhaps the ability to read and write was lost in the 1500s as they moved away being younger sons without inherited property or the influence level was lessened  which may have resulted in the spelling of their name becoming random in the records as one notes reading these early Parish Registers. But the surprise was looking at the DNA matches in ancestry for this new cousin. He actually did  not match myself or my siblings or any of my 30 plus cousins on Ancestry. However, it prompted me to play a bit with the search function putting Pinkham into the tree search and the results were surprising and included the line from which he descends. I already knew that one member of my group was related to the Pincombe/Pinkham family at Roborough - a small match lost in the latest rendition of AncestryDNA but dutifully recorded by me when Ancestry announced they would be reducing the number of matches at the small end of the spectrum. I do not really trust matches under 20 cM but Ancestry uses Timber and matches can be smaller than they actually are when taken into other databases. The match has opened my eyes to the Pinkham found in the Royal Colony of New Hampshire and some American Pinkham families tracing back to this individual. The yDNA does not match the known yDNA of my male cousins but this Pinkham coming to New Hampshire does not have a proven path back into Devon and so he could have had a mother with the surname Pinkham. This doesn't prove that but does leave one with the thought that finding matches with descendants of this Pinkham family in New Hampshire is remarkable and I shall write it up in the next newsletter for the Pincombe-Pinkham family. 

The meeting is soon to begin and I must do my weight lifting at the same time to keep in sync with my regimen of exercise. Breakfast consumed and on to the day.