National Day of Reconciliation

I watched many of the National Days of Reconciliation around Canada but in particular in Ottawa. The dismemberment of families and forcing children to actually leave home for months on end to be in a boarding school which offered very little comfort and care to children who had lived in a close family grouping all of their lives before school. The unkindness, the actual illegal acts against them will be forever part of our history and remembered particularly every year on the 30th of September. Helping the First Nations to regain their lost culture and languages is of foremost importance and this is funding that must continue to be available for years to come. But the First Nations themselves are doing all of that work of restoration and it is wonderful to see the results of all of that work on this National Day of Reconciliation. 

Continuing with my usual routines through today and that will complete that portion of the weekly work so that I can get back to the book writing - at least the preparation for more actual writing (re-phasing of my grandparents and perhaps the great grandparents to phase, time will tell). The work on Ancestry continues as I sort through all of the Blake entries for four siblings. There are 193 matches for myself and another 53 + 70 + 95 for the other three siblings. I probably pick up more for myself because I am into my account more often and tend to pick them up right to the smallest amounts. As I work through the other three siblings their numbers will probably increase. 

This latest group is interesting but thus far I can not spot the MRCA in the group of 30+ individuals who all match each other and myself (and the other three as well but only one of them significantly). It is hard to believe that 30+ descendants of a 10x great grandparent have this individual/couple as our MRCA with 20 to 30 cM matches (and I have not yet added in all the smaller amounts down to 6cM that may match as I am still determining that). But thus far all of the group that has a tree has colonial ancestry in the New England States/Southern States extending back into the early 1700s and earlier and appear to be totally colonial in this early period. They could all be in the Knight line and a few of them have Knight ancestors in their trees. It was some of the earlier records that were removed as being just too small that actually listed the Sedgwick family. There is another block in Australia/New Zealand and I am fairly sure that they are descendants of siblings of my 2x great grandfather Blake as a couple of them have a tree going back far enough and they form another 20 to 25 members in the group. There is one tree that goes back to my 4x great grandfather Joseph Blake but not too many details. Ideally finding Joseph's father Thomas would also be great but this is a small family in the 1700s with Joseph having been baptized in 1730, his father Thomas baptized in 1709 and both being only children (or their sibling did not survive childhood). The father of Thomas also a Thomas baptized in 1685 and he was the second son in a family of eleven children although four did not survive infancy including the older brother of Thomas. I do not have marriages for the three surviving daughters. But definitely this was a small family coming down from the late 1600s at Andover with few records for Blake in the Parish Registers. 

 Work is cut out for the day. Time to make tea and work on the Solitaire Puzzles.