Cleaning accomplished but not much else

Cleaning all accomplished and that was the two floors - lucky this house is small because I am getting older. Although at this point in time I can still manage everything fairly readily. I also cleared away the fresh snow fall; we are really welcoming it this February. Sometimes by February it can seem never ending but this year our snowfall has been very light and not one day below minus 20 degrees celsius yet. One wonders what March will bring. I would call this a London winter. And it is the first London winter that I have experienced in 49 years amazingly!

Today is the basement cleaning and the cleaning will then be all accomplished. Back to work so to speak.

I thought about Blake yesterday but actually did not do anything on the book. I need to start gathering data on the lines that I have not traced down. Most of them stayed in England with the exception of  the Sedgwicke family - Joanne Blake married Major General Roberte Sedgwicke 9 Jan 1634 at Andover. However Joanne returned to England perhaps after her husband died in Jamaica in 1656 and died at Stepney in London in 1667. Her children remained in Charlestown, Massachusetts Royal Colony and I actually have Blake matches (atDNA) with descendants of this family which is surprising although they are small but sometimes you can have this stubborn piece of Blake that just keeps on going (the matches are pretty much with all four of us who tested at Ancestry). There are in this direct path a couple of Blake-Blake marriages deep in the past (Nicholas Blake likely married his first cousin Margaret Blake (daughter of Thomas Blake, son of Robert his grandfather). I also propose that the original surname itself came from the marriage of a person without a surname (likely John) with a daughter of Richard le Blak when Richard le Blak was still living in Berkshire. Very ancient really and I do not see any matches with known descendants of the Blake family of Calne in my line although Jone Blake is an unknown The grandparents of Joanne Blake were Richard Blake and Jone (Blake) Blake perhaps providing that double lot of Blake gene pool that sends a duplicating portion of Blake genes down the line so to speak. Not sure why this Blake line did not really leave England until the late 1890s and into the 1900s (mine came to Canada in 1913 making me first generation Canadian on my father's side and fourth generation Canadian on my mother's side). My father used to talk about a relative. who went out west, had come to Canada before he did (he was actually my grandfather's first cousin and not his uncle but a first cousin once removed. I did assume Blake but actually his surname was Knight and I have since been in contact with some of his descendants as we match on 23 and Me actually. But the Blake family moved away from the Andover area itself but not out of the country particularly. There are still Blake families in the Andover area descendant of John Blake and Ann (Farmer) Blake and I have quite a few matches on the various databases since we have tested at 23 and Me, Ancestry, BritainsDNA, Ethnoancestry, FT DNA, Living DNA, My Heritage, National Genographic and Sorenson Genomics, The amount of data quite overwhelms these days and I have greatly restricted my collection of it. At least two of us has tested at all of these databases and in total five siblings have tested yielding tons of data for sure. Of value to only us really but I think for the most part the really interesting matching is between the five of us; I am least like any of them and the shared atDNA is amazingly spread from the least that full siblings can share to being quite similar. DNA is fun actually. It is possibly the best part of surname studies but then it was DNA that really brought me in after I had done the Profile for my cousin of the Pincombe family in Westminster Township, Middlesex County, Ontario, Canada.

On to the day; I slept in slightly and it is already 7:30 a.m.