I already heard back from South West Heritage Trust and the first document is ordered with predicted delivery date 10 to 12 weeks. That sort of blows my one month estimate out of the water but not a problem I will just adjust that thought. I am going to go into the chapter today and work on it with the thought in mind that I did not put quite enough in when I wrote last year (hard to believe it is an entire year since I started the book as I waited for my cataract surgery). I did start reading the Pincombe book yesterday and tomorrow and Saturday will be Pincombe days.
This first document now ordered may or may not reveal information on Robert Blake, his widow Joan and his son John. We will see. Following the money though does tend to work well. This was property being adjusted because of Joan's widowhood one might think or a son coming of age. With that in mind I shall wait patiently for the document as they mentioned they are very busy. At approaching 80 (I will soon be at 79.5 years), God has seen fit to let me stay on this earth for all this time so I do hope I am spending it in a worthwhile way. That has always been my purpose to make everyday a worthwhile day. To learn something new, to take care of my children when they were small and to just be here in case I am ever needed. Watching the young woman held hostage in Gaza collapse into her mother's arm and just sob makes every one aware that her children may always need her but raising them as God-fearing, God-loving people one knows that they will always sense my presence in their lives and they will draw on that as the years unfold.
So it is breakfast time and I have already had my tea and first yoga and then make my breakfast. The same every day, cooked oatmeal with cranberries and raisins and milk as the liquid then add blueberries, wheat germ and wheat bran when it is finished cooking. The same kind of oats every day. I love that repetition as it means I do not have to think about what I will eat for breakfast. I am not a foodie for sure. Now that my daughter's Christmas visit is past I will slowly lose those few pounds I gained.
Yesterday I changed up my exercise routine somewhat. I am back to running in the morning just before lunch and then in the afternoon I did a weightlifting routine that is on a CD that I have. Must look at the name of the producer as I have several of them but the weightlifting routine is really excellent and I was finding that my routine that I made up was not as adequate as it once was. I simply wasn't fatiguing the muscles and one needs to fatigue the muscle to keep them sturdy in one's old age.
I will likely continue bouncing my thoughts off the blog as the day passes whilst I update this chapter on the le Blak family of Berkshire/Wiltshire. It just seems like a reasonable passage for Richard le Blak to be in Wargrave in the early 1300s and then gradually move towards Calne over the next few years or he could already in the late 1200s and early 1300s be on the move. The records will show me perhaps as I reread them. Being a Norman, his patent shows he was of Rouen, Normandy, it would just seem a logical path for him to take with his family. Who did he marry? I have no idea but he did have a daughter Alicia as mentioned in the Pipe Roll and likely the John also at Wargrave was his son. Hamo Blake and his son Walter at Waltham St Lawrence are very close by. Interesting really and does remind me so much of sitting and listening to my grandfather as he talked about the Blake family of Andover (although he himself was born at Upper Clatford it was his 2x great grandfather Joseph Blake who was of Andover and married Joanna King at Upper Clatford and moved there). Interestingly in the will of the father of Joanna he only mentioned his son in law Joseph Blake as taking over his farm and assets. I suspect that Joseph and Joanna were second cousins on their mother's side.
At first I was skeptical of family lore and I still retain that skepticism but I think one has to view it from the viewpoint of the context. What was most important to my grandfather was fixing Nicholas as what was written about Nicholas Blake in many family books of that time interval towards the end of the 1800s was incorrect and that meant a lot to him. He really did not have a strong interest in the idea that they were related to the Calne Blake family he simply relayed all of these family lore stories that had been told to him as a child. I think his interest in being a descendant of one of the Lost Tribes of Israel ranked considerably higher in his telling and in his mind. There was also the continuing theme as he grew up that his Blake family had been in the Andover area for ever which reminded me in my old age that that is exactly what the members of the First Nations say about their families. It is what you say when your history is deep in the land going back so far in the past you can not locate the beginning. For me I know exactly where my ancestral family was born back well into the 1500s for most lines - for a couple less so but definitely/most likely (one must add that as I have Huguenot ancestry from the late 1400s) they were in the British Isles and mostly England. But given the publication of the Blake Pedigree Chart and the Blake Family Chart roughly two hundred years apart and continuing with the theme that the Andover Blake family was related to the Calne Blake family is certainly interesting and more than worthy of investigation. For myself, that investigating is occurring far from the record base and I will purchase documents that I feel are pertinent but I do realize that in the future others may contest what I have written and hopefully correct it if I am wrong. I appreciate their efforts and thank them for that work on their part (this work will be available freely to academics). This will become interesting because of Diana, Princess of Wales as she is absolutely descendant of the Calne Blake Family but I believe also descendant of the Andover Blake family (by the charts that exist this is a truth but based on a supposition that is not correct, the two charts both differ on the exact link between these two families). But I will propose a link that I believe can stand up to the records; time will tell. But the next King of England, the oldest son of Charles is next in line, carries the DNA from his mother that reaches far back into the past definitely coming down from the Calne Blake family on the maternal side and I believe likely from the Andover Blake family also on the maternal side. The Calne Blake family of Norman/Frankish origin and the Andover Blake family Western Hunter Gatherer but both on the female side intermittently mixed with male descent and hence neither the yDNA nor the mtDNA are of any value but overall the ancient DNA we carry, all of us, have markers that take us back to those interesting individuals who followed the herds of wild animals and ended up in Northern Europe and the British Isles. Fascinating really. One would have to have known my grandfather to know that there was something about him that made him so very English but his death certificate describes him as Canadian. He died in 1953. He actually had very little accent (I do find people in Hampshire do not have a strong accent) and blended into the world around him because the part of Canada in which I grew up was very "English" English as I say! But the priest who taught them gave them a well rounded education in English, French, Latin and lots of mathematics and science. He was fascinating to talk to and I missed him terribly when he died in 1953 and I was just 8 years of age.
Back to the le Blak Chapter. As I am looking at the work I have done thus far I suddenly feel this twinge of conscience that makes me wonder if I had sufficiently looked at the French records (and more have come up on both Ancestry and My Heritage) in this time frame and I think I will spend a little time on that today. I did not find anything new in my forays into the search. Which is fine but I really should look every once in a while just in case.
A lot of reading today but not a lot of writing. It is time for thinking for a bit whilst I sort through the material that I have on le Blak to make sure I include everything that I found significant.
Rowing machine today and I am up to 13 minutes. My run was the usual 30 minutes and a 15 minute walk followed just as a cool down. This afternoon I will do calisthenics in a bit and then my exercise day is done.
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