I did attend Church online and as always a lovely Service and the organ music was perfect. I do love to listen to the organ. My father could play the organ and occasionally when I was at the Church on a weekday when he was repairing something I would hear him play on the organ. He had a soft gentle touch which was so like my daughter playing the piano years later. I can remember being struck with the similarity in their approach to managing the keys. The Sermon was interesting as all Sermons in Advent are I think. There is that waiting time whilst Christmastide works its way once again into our lives with the memory of the birth of the Baby Jesus. It is the centrepoint of the Christian Life welcoming new life but especially the son of God. God waits for us to catch up and assimilate the words of Jesus given to us two thousand years ago. Will we ever make it to that plain of peace; can greed be overcome and the prosperity of the world be the more important aspect of earning money?
Got right into planning the methodology behind doing the phasing of the great grandparents in a rigorous fashion. I am preparing yet another excel document which will, by chromosome, denote the known areas for each of the eight lines. It is in a way a simple task because I am just stepping back one generation from the phasing already done. So each coloured length belonging to a grandparent is going to be divided into two or more some are very long or it could stay as one but the gradation runs from 0% to 100% and strict thoughts would say 50%/50% but seldom does Mother Nature obey such archaic thoughts as a perfect transmission of 50% from each (I inherited an unbalanced Blake/Rawlings which shows up strongly in my numbers although I did inherit a single Blake gene on Chromosome one which is the longest and contains matches that I share with many Colonial Americans having family trees back into the 1600s and earlier for some back into the British Isles. Given my three only Canadian ancestors (my mother, her father and his mother) and all the rest born in England back into the 1600s and before as far as I can determine; the American cousins do mystify me somewhat but I do have Joanna Blake married to Roberte Sedgewicke in the 1600s and their children were born in the Royal Colony of Massachusetts and remained in this part of the world up to the present it would appear! The power of meiosis is Mother Nature determining which genes will be chosen from the two sets that appear at Crossover and nature says do no harm so what passes will be the successful gene length with the less successful being discarded. That is how Homo sapiens developed to where it is now. So in each case the weaker falls to the wayside but it is Mother Nature that determines that. But we have much to learn about DNA. I see there are experiments with harnessing the ability of the cell to repair itself which is exciting especially for a child for whom the choice still did not give that child the best chance in life simply because the choices were not excellent. Interesting really.
That took up just a part of my day as I want to annotate my file for the 23 Chromosomes which will take some time. I see probably a good six months to do an adequate job of that. I must treat it as a submission to a journal article so that I do not miss anything significant that makes it a complete tool. But it is a family document; nothing more nothing less and of no value to anyone outside of a family unit. Our DNA may set us on a path in life but how we live that life is so much more important - avoiding the pitfalls like excessive drinking is really important as I can see that with my maternal grandfather although he died from chronic endocarditis following a serious flu at that time. My mother always thought he died from excessive drinking and perhaps that was part of the reason but it was an unlucky set of circumstances that took away her beloved father when she was only eight years of age. His father had lived to be 80 years of age and his father had lived to be 86 but Robert Pincombe, my 3x great grandfather also died a young death at the age of 52. For the most part these Pincombe men lived very long lives actually; their genes strong I guess. Life did not record why but Robert's death was sudden as his will was written right at the time of his death. But for John the alcohol was draining for him as she mentioned he had sick days when she was young and her mother learned to drive a tractor to help him out - my grandmother was truly amazing and also fourteen years younger than he was. He always represented the epitome of sadness of the times with his younger brother dying at the age of six months when he was just seven years of age and then his mother died when he was fourteen years of age and his sister a year later when he was fifteen. He and his father did not get along very well which was unfortunate but the farm had belonged to his mother and was left to him and instead of following his dream of being an Engineer and building the Trans Canada Railway he had to leave school at the end of High School instead of going on and becoming an Engineer like his great grandfather Thomas Routledge. His father remarried and had a young daughter and preferred to travel instead of managing the farm. That is a long time ago but the paperwork tells the story and for John Routledge Pincombe I can have only the greatest sympathy for his life was sad; so sad. The book is a tribute to John really thanking him for being the grandfather I never knew but whom I would have loved as much as I loved my paternal grandfather. When I was young most people had four grandparents as I recall but I only ever had two known to me although I must say both of them gave me a picture of the missing grandparents when I was young so that I felt as if I knew them. Their pictures firmly in my mind and one night very recently now I dreamed that my Grandmother Blake came to me and stood beside me and touched my shoulder whilst I was working on the DNA. What did it mean? Was it support? It has taken me a bit of time to assimilate that event. I think it was now and I am finding myself more willing to go forward with the eighth great grandparent and settle on a "likely" name for this individual. My dreams can be very illuminating at times for me as my grandparents slide back into my life briefly whilst I sleep and the memory of things said becomes much clearer moving out of that subconscious where wonderful moments lie and back into main stream. I feel blessed to have such dreams actually. Her youth was so much with her when I saw her in my dream wearing the same clothes as the picture of this family when my father was about six years of age and she would have been 34 years old and my grandfather was 35. The picture was taken in England and Grandpa I think told me what occasion it was but the memory is frail and I can not exactly recall it but the picture I have inserted into this blog. I never noticed before that he is wearing the normal short pants of his age group in this picture. One needs to blow it up to see that. Perhaps it was his entry into school at that time. Who would have guessed that in just another three years they would all be in Canada. The set of pictures for my father in his youthful days are all reminiscent of time periods that were important (I think many people copied the Royal House presenting the child when they could sit up, then as a toddler, their first school, their passage from Infant School to Regular School and so on by then my father was in Canada arriving just after his ninth birthday). There are still pictures of him as he moved through adolescence and into adulthood but I haven't really thought them through at this time. Each one seemed to be carefully planned. He was an only child.
Ada Bessie Cotteril (Rawlings) Blake, Ernest Edward George Blake, and Samuel George Blake circa 1910, Eastleigh, Hampshire, England
Tea all drank and must do my solitaire puzzles; soon time for breakfast and it is cleaning day so another busy day in this household.
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