Day two finished for cleaning this week and today it is the basement. The robot will soon do its task of vacuuming the rugs. Another beautiful day in God's world. It is minus 23 degrees celsius with a beautiful golden sun rising in the east. Day is actually predicted to reach minus nine degrees celsius so we will see if there is a slight warming trend coming to the Ottawa Valley. It has been a cold week and a blustery week with lots of snow. Wonderful for the spring melt for sure saturating this great land deep into the roots of the mighty trees that dominate our landscape. When one flies into Ottawa you can only see trees for miles and miles and then suddenly there is a city right in front of you. The frozen Ottawa River will soon enough swell up with all of that fresh water flowing into it from the lakes and the streams that feed it. But in the meantime lots of more snow falling to the ground to refresh the land after the drought of last summer. The United States too is benefiting from all of this cold and heavy snow as it should help to swell up their rivers in the west. The loss of life during these difficult snow periods is sad though.
Parliament back in and I watched question period. Sometimes I think that people forget that Prime Minister Carney carries a lot of Irish blood and the Irish are fighters for sure (he has excellent debating skills and always includes the members of his party (it is nice not to have a one man show)). I think it will be an exciting session of Parliament given that the leader of the Conservative Party is in his background French and they are also fighters (he too lets the members of his caucus play a role in parliament). Out of all this arguing will come a better plan for Canada and diversification of our trade. The President of the United States did say he wanted the countries of the Western Hemisphere to be successful and that is what we are taking from his direction - a move to make Canada even more successful. It is interesting that the leaders of the two main parties are not "English." Their style of governing is not English at all; one can see the roots of their Irish heritage and their French heritage. I would have to check but I think this may be the first time that at least one of the main leaders of our government do not have an English heritage. Sometimes I think people become confused when one talks about English Canadians - for most of them the only thing English about them is their language - they are not English English as I call myself on occasion. But first of all I am Canadian and proud to be one. I think there is a beauty in all the countries of the world. Something exciting offers itself when a country has an individuality that people recognize immediately and it makes the world more exciting; more interesting. Peace in our time is the aim and one just needs to follow God's words to us - love your neighbour as yourself.
Worked on Chromosome 4 yesterday and it is evolving nicely. A huge number of matches on a good length are all from the Gray-Routledge family. These ancestral lines are from the East Riding of Yorkshire (Gray) and Cumberland (Routledge). But each of them are eventually as one travels back in time likely Viking (Gray) and definitely Highlander Scot (Routledge). England is truly a mix of many European lines due to the estimated one kilometre of ice that sat on the British Isles during the Last Ice Age. Nothing would have survived from the period before that Ice Age. But I often wonder if the Western Hunter Gatherers who made their way to the British Isles 8,000 to 12,000 years ago had been there before and were returning to their homeland. My grandfather always talked about his family being in England for ever and the y signature of this family is Western Hunter Gatherer and said to be amongst the earliest of the inhabitants of the British Isles. He always said he was English not Irish and I concentrated on that and then suddenly the best match on the yDNA lived in Dublin, Ireland. It still makes me chuckle but around the Andover area running towards Basingstoke there are a number of families who have tested their yDNA and they all belong to this group of ancient Western Hunter Gatherers so one can easily believe that what he said was the truth that he knew; his family had always lived in the Andover area. With the coming of the Normans in 1066 life changed and one had to eventually acquire a surname. I contemplated that for a long time and finally as I searched out Blake working with Bill Bleak on the Blake yDNA study at FT DNA I started to contemplate why so many Blake lines in England - why would they choose the same surname? The discovery of the Emigrants Database was very revealing (1330 - 1550) showing just under fourty individuals coming from the Continent and other parts of the British Isles not designated as English into England (there was a lot of traveling between Ireland and England in this time frame and if one reads the Calendar of Patent Rolls people were sent there and returned to England so one can not judge the country of origin within the British Isles using this set of documents). But the thought continued in my brain why would a farmer working his land at Enham choose the surname Blake when it was already used so much (the British are a very independent people so I can not imagine that an ancestor of mine would do that unless there was a reason)? I think the logic that I have brought to this discussion in my brain that an individual would have seen an advantage in marrying a Norman and why not use that surname works in an interesting way. It certainly wouldn't hurt them and the advantages were probably there for them to do so. Hence I began to look at all of my accumulated information differently and the Blake families of Berkshire and the Blake family at Andover did have an association of some sort in the mid 1500s that doesn't state a relationship it simply implies it by mentioning each other in their wills. After all anyone reading the will at that time would have known these individuals were related. Anyway an interesting thought on my part especially given the tendency of people (particularly indigenous peoples) to say they have lived in a place forever. As nothing has occurred to change my mind in that regard these past five years or more I continue in that vein. Plus it suits the accumulated information on the Blake family in England which points out inconsistencies within the data that can readily be answered by time passing and memory blurring the exact time and place of events.
I continue to correspond with the individual who wrote to me from Upper Clatford. Her surname Kennedy is interesting because my 2x great grandmother Mary (Routledge) Gray had a sister Grace who married George Arthur Kennedy 14 Jun 1810 at Lanercost, Cumberland. This family came to Canada in 1818 with Thomas Routledge and Elizabeth (Routledge) Routledge. And so I have Kennedy cousins. However it is not an unusual surname and found also in Ireland as well as Scotland. I need to reply to her email and will do that today.
Also I will continue with Chromosome 4 and I have just under 30 matches still to do. I have only a couple that I can not sort away from Pincombe or Blake but that may happen as well. Otherwise I will just ignore them - I have plenty of matches and it doesn't matter in the long term. Then just three chromosomes to do and my task of extraction is complete except I must now go back and look once again at the databases to see what has accumulated in the past few months. I occasionally glance at them and nothing huge has come in but there are some interesting ones that I will look at. Time is passing quickly and I have been at my computer for over an hour which I tend not to do but rather get up and walk for ten minutes every hour.
Tea is finished and I need to do the solitaire puzzles. Walk first.
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