It is five years today since we lost Edward; it seems like yesterday and yet it also seems a long time ago. Life has changed all around us. Because he did not wish to be forgotten we have talked about him and tried to keep some of his research alive with the website. I respond to all of his mail and gradually we have found new homes for historical items that he collected for his various families. I am still in that process with a number of boxes of original material. It is a slow process to do that.
Edward was born 16 April 1943 at the farm which is in Burford Township, Brant County facing the Highway (which divides Oxford and Brant Counties) and the village of Princeton (Oxford County) where Edward grew up after they moved from the farm into the village when he was about two and one half years of age. His father died in a farm accident when he was two years and two months of age. He was a very sensitive child and cried when his father was mentioned and so little mention of his father for many years around him and as an adult he didn't want to be forgotten like that and he has not been. Edward has done so many wonderful things in his life and perhaps his greatest gifts to the world aside from his lovely daughters was his research still cited all these years later. He did some groundwork on Cobalt for his PhD in Inorganic Chemistry which has proven to be baseline work often cited in other people's work. That he did not become a scientist because of the lack of jobs at the time (true for all of his classmates as it turned out) was somewhat of a sorrow to him but he retrained and earned his Masters in Library Science and was employed at the National Research Council in Ottawa, Canada for nearly thirty years contributing greatly to the ordering of knowledge in a systematic way making online retrieval an actual ability and readily available. He retired in 2004 and spent the next seventeen years working on his genealogy for his family uncovering an amazing story which he related several times at meetings. Rest in Peace dear Edward and know that your children and grandchildren remember you well and will never forget you nor will your many nieces and nephews. We were married 54.5 years and this year is sixty years since we married.
I think one of the joys that Edward acquired through life was my actually becoming interested in genealogy which he had been active in since his mid teens. He collected items where ever he went and when we bought a a car about eight or nine months after we were married we went everywhere looking for items to help to tell the story of his families. As I worked away yesterday on the Blake book I always find my mind traveling back to our times together. I had always helped to find items for him but he knew I wasn't really interested in genealogy but when I was he was thrilled and the retirement years saw us spend enormous amounts of time in New England, New York in particular although our travels took us to many places in the United States. But now I was looking occasionally at items that belonged to my studies. But it was my interest in DNA that he particularly was happy to see flourish once again as he wanted to use my knowledge of DNA to learn more about his Kipp line with the yDNA. It was a fun time acquiring all of that information and with the arrival of autosomal DNA testing he was able to prove his research in a meaningful way because so many of his American cousins tested their atDNA. It was amazing and he enjoyed it so very very much. He had a group of about a dozen cousins who tested for him and it will be all of this information that I use to create the phasing of his grandparents. A project that I will begin shortly and set aside one day of each week to probe the data and see what I can come up with.
Yesterday saw more work on the Blake book as I begin the genealogical charting. Right now I am in the process of putting together the information on Robert Blake who left his will dated 16 Dec 1521 living at Enham near Andover, Hampshire. He names a number of Blake individuals in his will that I must sort through once again refreshing my memory of that time when I did the work way back in 2014. That will continue today. I have related the interesting information that I have acquired on a Richard Blake who appears on the Emigrants Database 1330-1550 arriving at Salisbury, Dorset in 1440/1441 and his ethnicity is stated as Irish. Determining the earlier ancestry of Robert Blake at Enham has been something I nip in and out of through the years but now this is the time to try and sort it into the beginning of the Genealogical Chart for Blake at Andover.
Time for breakfast, the day moves quickly.
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