Church Service yesterday

 The Church Service yesterday in England talked about the Chinese New Year. It was a very interesting service and initially I was a bit disappointed as I was enjoying my tour around the English countryside but the service was very nice and I enjoyed it. 

Today is the large cleaning day and I shall get started soon. No research today. I am planning now for running outside once the winter is finished and the snow gone (perhaps mid April) so have switched my running to first thing in the morning. I need to work through the organization of that though. It does require some modification to run fourty minutes first thing in the morning effectively. Process has begun.

A lot of thinking yesterday about the two books but no writing as I try to stay off the computer and rest my eyes for that entire day. Today is a full cleaning so that means the eyes get a rest today as well. 

Where am I at? Still waiting for the Inquisition Postmortem but I think they give themselves a month perhaps; can not remember those details for the last one. But it does seem like it could be that long. I expect they are busy this time of year given it is a good time to do research. I need to check out documents I will want from the Hampshire Record Office as well. But once I have a path roughly constructed backwards I can also work forwards which is helpful. For both of these trees I do have extensive ones but some of the work was done when I was a Newbie and so I must go back and verify carefully all of those connections. 

Family lore can be helpful but must be proven. On the one hand how many people would be talking about Nicholas Blake at Old Hall (left his will probated 20 Jun 1547) in the late 1800s/early 1900s? Well there is a reason they might be. Horatio Gates Somerby's genealogy endeavours, and they were incorrect, picked Nicholas out of a hat so to speak and gave him a brother Humphrey who then married someone in Somerset and founded a line of Blake there. This story was adopted by many Blake American families trying to find their ancestral location in England. Totally made up but it brought Nicholas once again to the surface I suspect so this family in Andover knew that it was incorrect, must have discussed it and my grandfather and father both had a good memory of this individual. I was trying to think why the memory of Nicholas was so strong in my mind as well and it was because they emphasized that he was their ancient ancestor and Nicholas is not that common a name and so it stuck in my mind as I was very young plus the idea of his living at "Old Hall" was somewhat macabre to a child here in Canada. So family lore can be interesting but then one must do the leg work to get it across the finish line. 

Why did Horatio Gates Somerby make this up: for greed absolutely; money as usual as he was doing research for wealthy patrons. One of the worst human traits is greediness. Like everyone else I am sure that I have to fight it as well I just have perhaps less of a tendency towards it; my mother can be thanked for that as she was the most giving person I ever knew. She would always give away the best including my jumper when I was eight which I quite loved and did not know it was gone until I saw the exact duplicate on a child at school. Of course I said nothing; manners were everything as far as my mother was concerned. But I did ask when I got home where my jumper was since I couldn't find it in my closet. My mother said it was too small for me and she had put it into the bag for those less fortunate. As a child in a family of five children at that time (would be seven) I must admit to feeling just this twinge of envy that my jumper belonged to someone else as my grandma had made it for me. But I accepted that her need was greater than mine and moved on and never said anything but my mother asked me after that. A lot of people came to Canada at that time (early to mid 1950s) with very very little. 

Well breakfast time; tea all drank and enjoyed. Nothing like green tea first thing in the morning.