The Churches of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales are ancient to the British Isles going back to the Christian Church of each of these areas preceded by the Celtic Church of each of these areas and back through the centuries preceding. Bishops of the Christian Church of England met at the Council of Arles in 314 and the Council of Rimini in 359 duly recorded in history much prior to the arrival in 597 of St Augustine of Canterbury (First Archbishop of the Church of England sent by Pope Gregory the Great) during the time of the Roman occupation of Britain. I have mentioned in other blogs the belief by some that Joseph of Arimathea (a Jewish man from Judea who provided the tomb in which Jesus Christ laid) came to England (and some believe he brought Jesus as a youth) and was the first person to bring Christianity to Britain. Many believe he brought the Holy Grail to England and hid it at Glastonbury in what is now called the Chalice Well. But the heading said that Henry VIII did not create the Church of England, nor did he. He simply separated the Church from the Holy See as it had been prior to 597. It was during the reign of his daughter Elizabeth I that the Church of England was excommunicated along with all the people of England who did not swear fealty to the Pope as Head of the Church; they chose Queen Elizabeth.
Watching the service in the Vatican brought back all the memories of being in the Sistine Chapel in November of 2001. We (my eldest daughter and I (and my husband in later years regretted not going with me as I asked him first if he would like to go to Rome for the Consecration of the American Bishop of Europe as he had invited the entire listserv to go - I accepted right away as I felt he was serious and indeed he approached the Monastery where we all stayed and asked if they would be able to accommodate the group (there was quite a few of us from England, United States, Australia and myself and my daughter from Canada)). It was wondrous; my first plane trip. So we caught the plane to Philadelphia and then on to Rome; one week later on to London, England and then a few days later back to Pittsburgh and then to Ottawa. It was fabulous. I loved every minute. I would have been 56 years old then and a very kind American pointed out to us from the window (it was night) the different cities that we crossed from Ottawa to Philadelphia. It was a small plane but the stars were so bright in the sky and as we passed over the Finger Lakes in New York State (I looked down and thought yes it does look like the hand of God). I have written about my trip much earlier in my blog.
As I watched the service I experienced once again the thrill of being in the Sistine Chapel where we spent at least two hours (my daughter was literally pulling me along through the room and eventually the Swiss Guards cleared the room and we were on our way through the rest of the Vatican Museum). When Edward and I were there in 2010 we did go to the Sistine Chapel but did not see very much of the Vatican Museum; for the first time he said I should have gone with you and always wanted to go back for another trip in Rome. It just didn't happen as COVID got in the way of the trip to Germany which was to be followed by a trip to Rome. That was the beginning of his visible illness when we returned from that trip but he still traveled and enjoyed it all but was more careful of what he ate and drank whilst we were away. At that time we did not know that he had a hidden liver disease. When I hear that our youth now is not so much into alcohol it is a good thing as Edward did drink perhaps too much as a youth; no ideas on that I wasn't there. I have only drank alcohol in memory and at celebrations and have always been like that. The industry would not survive on me as a purchaser for sure!
Yesterday I cleaned the basement and all done by 11:30 a.m. I worked on the matches for Chromosome 10 and there are 64 matches and I am just half way through so will perhaps complete that one today. The five of us have a good part of that set of chromosomes covered by known matches and I am just firming up the numbers for the cross over points. All four of the lines are well represented although the visible gaps in Rawlings continue telling me that I have not done sufficient research on these lines but the Rawlings are all over the world and many of them went to Australia and I am not really prone to writing all those matches. My cousin William Rawlings in Australia did give me his research and I wonder sometimes if he thought I would write it all up. I do have a DVD from another Australian researcher that I match very well on DNA and her research also helpful - she did it while home with her newborn (a really smart idea). I suppose I should be more intent on finding my paternal grandmother's actual father but the stories of her love for her step father and all her family tells me that they were her people and she really did not think beyond that. My father was baptized in her village of Kimpton rather than Upper Clatford where his father grew up or even Eastleigh where my father was born. However for completeness I should pay a little more attention and have noted the Sherwood family and others now. It was Willian Cotterill who married Rose Sherwood 21 Feb 1852 at Kimpton and within the collections of data I have Cotterill, Alderman, Sherwood and Happerfield (William's parents were Charles Cotterill and Hannah Alderman who married 23 Oct 1824 at Kimpton and Jane's parents were John Sherwood and Sarah Happerfield who married 10 Jul 1821 at South Tidworth (near Kimpton). Fascinating really that one can do that.
Moving on and will work away at the matches today and perhaps complete Chromosome 10. I do not really have much on the go other than the Photo Books. I do think about the write up of the Blake and Pincombe books and I am coming up to the H11 Newsletter on the 1st of November. It is just a short two pager generally with the main issue 1st of February working on the subgroups in H11 (I am a volunteer co-ordinator for this study) which I do list on the FT DNA website in the H11 study (a link takes the reader to the newsletter which sits on my website) but there isn't any information that identifies any of the members of the group. It is simply a list of the individual subclades that are created by these members and in fact represent just a small portion of the much larger group of individuals that belong who are on the FT DNA website (although the study group is over 400 now). That isn't to say it is not meaningful; it is fascinating how this very small relatively speaking haplogroup subclade of H (a very large group) has evolved through time immemorial and on the other hand how it has remained very much as it was thousands of years ago when my ancestral mother first stepped on the British Isles likely having made the trek from Ukraina up through the now Scandinavian Peninsula across to Scotland and eventually settling in the Ayrshire/Argyllshire area where they lived possibly as long as 8000 years ago as they appear in the Blood of the Isles database.
When I first tested my brothers for yDNA and myself (and my brothers) for mtDNA I was amazed to discover that these two individuals (my parents) each had an ancient British ancestor. I have not researched particularly my paternal grandmother; still need to see a direct female line going back from her but I haven't looked particularly yet and again I have not overly researched my paternal grandfather although do have quite a bit of information on his yDNA line which leads me back to Europe (likely The Netherlands/Belgium at least in England possibly since the early 1100s) in their lines going back through time in the British Isles. Who would have guessed that in my generation the yDNA for our Blake line would go extinct and that the mtDNA for my mother's maternal line would go extinct in the grandchildren's generation (we are seven siblings (four boys, three girls!) but of course I did not realize that until my children had children. However, nothing is lost; there are many descendants of this man and this woman who trekked through the wildernesses of Europe to reach the British Isles eons ago (one from Ukraina and one from the Balkans where both haplogroups are known to have wintered during the Last Glacial Maximum). In 2007 this did tell me though that I needed to do this; this study of my family. It needed to be me; it needed to be now because it will be lost in another generation; all that knowledge. Being a computer driven person (first programmed in 1965 with Fortran, moved to COBOL and then we bought a home computer in 1984) I dived right in and twenty two years later I am still there. Collecting, writing and blogging on my experiences in Family History. My blog begins with our trip (Edward and I) to Salt Lake City in Oct/Nov 2008 and the Family History Library where I practically never left the British floor as everything you could possibly want was there and the only other place that has more in the original form is Kew in London, England where I have also been a number of times (2010, 2013, 2016) and as Edward once said it was very difficult to get me to leave before closing. But I can honestly say it was not really me that started me on this DNA path; it was my mother's interest in doing the DNA of the family. Looking back through her twenty five years of letters (all scanned now) she visited the Family History Library a number of times and definitely wanted me to do the same. Initially in the mid to late 1980s as my parent's 50th Wedding Anniversary (1988) approached she asked my husband Edward to do a family book for their anniversary and he promptly set me to the task of extracting the information and eventually it was me that wrote it up although he directed the project for sure. But his own family consumed him for sure and I knew that it was my responsibility to do that project. But I found it so difficult to really feel positive about the connections and so I drifted away from any involvement with genealogy (it was pretty short at that time; just five or six trips to the Family History library here). It would take a much stronger push to get my mind into genealogy and then DNA entered into the scene and the world changed and we will never go back to life before knowledge of DNA. It is seeping slowly but surely into our very being. It tells us who we are, who begat us and perhaps for some more importantly our health. As AI advances it will move into the health field for sure but it does always need to have a human touch in there; AI is like a dumb computer; we feed it and we direct it and how we do that is very very important in order to have results that are reasonable, anticipated and understandable. There must never be blind acceptance of AI results. But AI is fast; it can read and remember vast amounts of information and it is always changing and staying young. The human touch though is what makes it complete; it is not complete without that.
Tea drank and a slice of banana bread thinly buttered eaten so time for breakfast.
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