Another day of great accomplishment and hopefully more of the same today. The Kip-Kipp Newsletter is completed and will publish it on the 1st of February. It will also be the last time that I published the H11 Newsletter which is rather sad. When I decided, after Russia invaded Ukraine, not to publish it because the people in my study from Ukraine would not have time to read it and the Russians in my study should certainly be trying harder to make their government aware that invading a sovereign country is illegal and immoral. But I have gone on and on at length about this dreadful war which is shedding the lifeblood of Ukrainian children and adults. The more that Russia continues to kill the greater the resolve builds of the Ukrainian people to defeat the Russian army and drive them back to the borders established at the fall of the Soviet Union. In the past one hundred years Russia has tried to destroy the Ukrainian people first under Stalin and now under Putin - both psychopaths. Putin is a Nazi though, although he throws that title around, he has all the attributes of a Nazi along with his enablers as he tries to steal land and riches from Ukraine.
On to the Siderfin book and I did accomplish and move forward and also backward with the book yesterday. When I let my cousin take over the Siderfin one-name project years ago now (maybe a dozen I would have to look it up) he wanted to establish a clear line for the Siderfin family and since he lived near Taunton I felt that I should step back and let him do that. At some point he did correspond with me concerning Sander's book on the Siderfin family noting that Sanders had wrongly placed his mother in the genealogical chart and I did accept that at face value. Yesterday, I had this sudden realization that I had not proven that for myself and that was my backwards step. Today I continue in that vein as at the beginning of the book where James writes that his mother was Elizabeth Siderfin I had dutifully put in the new line that my cousin had mentioned. The problem with giving up a study is that the new person may or may not have the same vision as you have; continuance until you have made a difference or found a person who can take it on and run with it for a good length of time is necessary in my humble opinion. My cousin gave up the study at some point during my husband's illness and I did not notice - BLAKE and PINCOMBE keep me pretty busy. So I would be reluctant to pass on either of my studies whilst I can still manage them with that history in mind.
Looking at the PINCOMBE study I inherited a more or less joint study called PINCOMBE for simplicity but it was literally a PINCOMBE-PINKHAM study. I was ambivalent about the PINKHAM surname section initially mostly because my great grandfather went to a great deal of trouble to correct the spelling of his surname on the census here in Canada being greatly disturbed with the spelling of PINKHAM when it was always spelled PINCOMB{E} in his family. He could accept the E at the end but not an entirely new spelling of the surname! Hence at a young age I learned that this was an incorrect spelling of the surname. However, the two researchers prior to me both had the PINKHAM surname and had studied PINCOMBE as well so I felt it would be an injustice on my part to shear off the one surname. Gradually as I acquired their work at the Society of Genealogists and via a PINCOMBE cousin in England, I could see that members of the PINCOMBE family in Northwest Devon (Barnstaple/Bideford area) had begun to use the surname PINKHAM interchangeably with PINCOMBE. Hence I continued as I started looking at the study from the same viewpoint as my predecessors had done.
Lately an interesting event occurred which I related a few days ago where a cousin (and I believe he is a cousin although distant) wrote to me about his line at Roborough. He had tested at Ancestry and I quickly checked the four kits of my family and the kit of my known fourth cousin but did not find a match with him. Since his line had the PINKHAM surname in his tree, I decided to put the PINKHAM surname into the search box on Ancestry under "name in tree." For whatever reason (or could be I have forgotten doing so) I had not done that in recent memory and surprisingly a number of matches popped up and what was most significant, as these matches were truly rather small in length, was that some of these individuals matched more than one of my siblings/cousin. That certainly captured my attention and I shall be writing that up in the next newsletter for this family due 1st of March 2023. But I have my siblings tested in all the databases and always more than one of us, generally four or five of us are tested at every company. So I shall start doing more searching on the PINKHAM surname in those databases. But my concentration for the moment will be Siderfin whilst I work away at revising this book that James Sanders so kindly wrote over a century ago.
There is a certain element of responsibility in taking on a study of a surname. The number of emails in my inbox testifies to that - you become known as a purveyor of information and one must be as accurate as possible or confess to not having knowledge of that line and perhaps direct the individual elsewhere if there is that possibility. That is my purpose and so I continue at 77 years of age doing just that. I do wonder on occasion if my eldest daughter will take up the torch when I step down but suspect that she will head for the KIPP study. When Edward passed away I did drop the study at the Guild in his name. I simply could not take it on and if there was another the opportunity to pick it up was then there. However, it has not been picked up and being a Germanic surname it may not be although more and more world surnames are being picked up by members of the Guild as it increases its presence around the world. It is somewhat dominated by "British" surnames though for the most part given its original roots but the purpose of the Society is acquisition of world information on a surname and hence anyone is welcomed to join.
So always a conundrum when looking at one's study and the furtherance of that study. On a world level, the number of holders of the PINCOMBE surname continues to dominate but the number of holders of the PINKHAM surname in the United State of America is quite large so time will tell when I do step down how the study will flow. DNA will certainly become a large part of surname studies in the future - in my studies it already dominates although I do not write up a lot on that particularly. In the BLAKE study it is known that the founding lines of the BLAKE family are multiple with a number of founding lines in England itself. With the PINCOMBE it appears to be a singleton family study and time will tell on that but reaching far back into the 1300s prior to the PENCOMBE family appearing at North Molton there is a record (and perhaps more than one I have only looked at the Calendar of Patent Rolls) of a PENCOMBE family at Pencombe, Herefordshire near Bromyard. How that will pan out in terms of learning about the early history prior to 1485 of this family is unknown to me; I have a number of early records for the family that have not yet been transcribed - a project for one of these days so I may discover that or I may leave it for others to come along and pick up as I did the PINCOMBE study in my early days of genealogy in 2006.
No comments:
Post a Comment