Up to page 135 and I have added a couple because of footnoting so 20 left to go and there are 22 pages of indexing. The end is in sight. I just need to proofread it from start to finish and then release and done. It does feel good to be nearly finished. I could hang in there and footnote here and there but someone else one of these days will pick it up and run with it as I did. It has been an interesting couple of years as I started it simply to correct the errors in James Sanders book but ended up finding that I could prove my line all the way back readily and so it seemed like I should do that and I did.
I am a bit impatient to get at the Blake and Pincombe books that is for sure but it will probably take me a month for each to read them and contemplate them and then move forward. It is always a slow process I think. But an interesting one as both families did pass down items that were interesting and helpful. My grandfather especially in the last years of his life liked to talk about Upper Clatford and the Blake family. Perhaps it was the two World Wars with the losses in his family that make it ever more poignant to think about his family and passing on information. I am sure when he died in 1953 he never would have thought having three grandsons (my youngest brother was not yet born) and no great grandsons. It would have shocked him I think but then he could look at his own family and there was my father and one male cousin with the Blake surname (grandchildren of his father Edward Blake) whose airplane was downed in France near Marseilles in the Second World War on a Reconnaissance Mission. But fortunately Edward had a number of brothers who did keep the name going well into this generation that follows me - lots of male Blake name holders.
From a DNA perspective, the Blake y-DNA ends with my generation of brothers for my grandfather's line, ends with my daughter's generation for the mt-DNA for my mother's mother's line but one of her younger sisters had several daughters so would have continued with them as far as I can tell. They live in the United States and I am not in communication with them. My mother's father's line ended with her brother who did not have any children. That is the way of it all really, in the long run there are many holders of the various y-DNA lines and mt-DNA lines but they may not have the same surnames having passed the particular haplogroup down through the centuries but they may not share the same alleles and so the y-DNA does get lost over time but the mtDNA does go on and on and it has few changes in thousands of years. Interesting really, DNA is going to be more and more important as science and medicine come together to have a better understanding of health and disease. It is all in the genes after all and life style.
Today is the main cleaning day and most of the time is taken up with that but I will get some work done on the charting book and hopefully complete this run through tomorrow and begin reading.
Up early with lots to do today and it is a rain/snow event possibly 8 centimetres. Amazing how I do love the snow.
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