The Budget Bill passed

 It should have  happened in December before Christmas break and I begrudge the time wasted about 2 and a half months that things could  have been happening. We need to move along and be quicker doing things. There are people unemployed and we need to get these ideas going so that they are employed. So that we are looking for workers and not having people without jobs. I have little patience for criticism at the moment. 

I did listen to the talk given by the Conservative Party Leader and there were some really good points there like working with the current government and getting it all done. I think of this as a Unity government at the moment and anyone who upsets the apple cart will find at the polls that most Canadians want these things to happen and as quickly and carefully as possible to give the greatest benefit to the Canadian people. That is what Confederation was all about; benefit to everyone in Canada. The provinces are simply a tool to make it easier to handle local issues; they are not autonomous and if you do not have enough money for health care then bring in a health tax and stiffle the complaints. 

I go to a doctor maybe once a year and the $750 health tax I pay is barely scratched by that visit although overhead affects this for sure as rent/equipment costs money and doctors pay for their own clinics (plus I pay more than that monthly in Income Tax which also goes partly to health care). I am actually part of the Ontario long term medical study and have to get my blood work for that and will very shortly when one of my daughters has time to take me. It is not that far away to drive but I have never given six tubes of blood and then driven and this is not going to be the first time when I am 80. Looking forward to the results of that test actually. I sort of think these days that people should know how much a doctor's visit costs even if the system is universal. Generally I think doctors are underpaid often enough for the work that they do. I like and dislike universal health care - it becomes too soft a cushion and one doesn't regard the actual cost of their medical care. Yet I do not want to see children without health care wandering about and it is a measure of a community that the people who live in it care for the people that live there. 

We have to be careful when we are over 75 and driving I think. Extremely careful with our mind totally on the road at all times and not to drive if we are tired. It is a must and if you fail to follow that you should not be driving. The world depends on that driver behind the wheel being aware at all times; no drugs and no drinking of alcohol.

Yesterday I worked away on Ancestry with some work on Gedmatch. A few more very interesting matches on Ancestry with Cotterell cousins and given the frequency of Cotterell on their side the matches were quite good for sixth cousins as they traced back to William Rawlins and Mary Ford (my five x great grandparents) through their daughter Mary who married Stephen Cotterell. They have a good tree and now I have all the children of Stephen and Mary which is so very helpful. There was also a long length of shared matches in Ancestry also very handy. Is the Cottrell family at Upper Chute/South Tedworth related to this Cotterell family? Are they both related to the Cotterill family at Kimpton (and I think Stephen is by the records I extracted but I am always looking for anything that contradicts any of this research). I do like it to be correct. So that made the day very interesting and obviously I do have Cotterell DNA (unless they are in a common area but that is the treat of Ancestry as they remove common lengths with TIMBER so generally your match is a true match with a similar family line). Since my only connection would appear to be through my paternal grandmother the priest recording her name as Ada Bessie Cotteril Rawlings was capturing what he believed to be true plus she was registered with that name and I must check the dates on those two items. I think the baptism was before the registration actually. In both cases Rawlings should have been Rawlins as her mother was baptized as Rawlins and Cotteril should have been Cotterill if the father was from the village of Kimpton. So very interesting and I am avoiding it looking like a soap box opera as far as I am able and sticking to facts. 

My mother used to watch all these soap box operas on the television and when I used to get home from university she would say come and watch and so I did a few times just to give her company but it gave me a dislike for soap box opera and whenever politics or anything begins to look like a soap box I avoid it if at all possible. 

Collection Day and I have already been outside to put the collected items out to the curb. This is the first time I have put out a garbage bag (I didn't even bother with the container which generally sits way at the back of the garage) which has basically one white garbage bag in it which has dental floss for six weeks, a few bandaids and the furnace filter which I checked and it is garbage not recyclable. Amazing really how much is being recycled. I am busy using the bread bags to collect up the smaller plastic bags from freezer goods and others, I use one of the yoghurt containers to collect up the small tinfoil, flexible plastic lids and the like, items that look like paper but do not tear so have plastic in them and then I put that filled container into the waste container and start a new one. It is starting to look neater when I put it out to the street but it all recycles. How wonderful that is. I do want to start buying my meat in butcher paper though although having these sealed plastic containers gives it a longer shelf life so it becomes problematic and I understand that. So I use that method when I want a little more time and the butcher paper from another store which generally has that for immediate usage. A new company has been formed to take care of all that addition to recycling; great for business. 

We are a country that produces boxes and other paper containers and we need to move to that where it is possible. It is easy to recycle paper. I can remember life without plastic bags so it can be done but it is more difficult to keep items fresh, to keep brown sugar from caking and there are other examples. One step I have taken is to use a freezer bag for storing brown sugar and wonder if a movement towards brown sugar in paper bags would work and just store it in the freezer bag. It can still clump in the lighter plastic but the freezer bag does a really good job and you just wash it and I have been using the same one for a couple of years now. 

Today I continue working on Gedmatch as Ancestry is mostly complete although will check for new matches and I am going through the four accounts that I have for siblings and looking at all the Common Ancestors and placing them into their coloured groups for ready recall in the future. That was how I located one set of Cotterell (sixth cousins) sharing 20 cM as my cutoff is 23 cM in Ancestry which can be quite a large number and likely I am missing items between 18 and 22 cM and in particular this one but I can only do so much of this and I have a lot more to do. 

Drinking my tea and time to do the solitaire puzzles.  

 

Surprise snowfall overnight

I missed the weather report that said snow and woke up today hearing the laneway being cleared by the company and realizing my black box was not far enough away although it was on the grass next door as I am hoping to get it emptied this week. Went out and moved it and cleaned out the snow and added some more so that it is about 3/4s full now. When the newspaper was delivered we didn't have any problem filling it but that is a long time ago. 

Just the sidewalks to clear and they will be around later to do that. This is southwestern Ontario snow as I call it; moist and great for making snowmen not our usual dry snow that does pack well on a hot sunny day but otherwise is pretty light and devoid of a lot of moisture. The trees all have a dusting of snow and look quite beautiful through the window of my workroom. Winter is lovely; I do love winter the best but a lot of the reason is all that solitude and time to work. Edward did not enjoy the solitude as much as I did and was out and about doing all his projects with me accompanying when he asked. He was so involved in so many things especially when he retired. For him, I think, being retired was sleeping in which he loved to do. That and just all that time to do anything that he wanted to do and his genealogical endeavours paid off big time for him in terms of unknown family to him but so well known to the world - Roger Williams, Hannah (Peak) Bowne, even the Royal Governor of Massachusetts and so many others. 

It was incredible that so much was lost. He found it amazing that I knew all of my ancestral stories but my first ancestor did not arrive here until 1818 and it was Thomas Routledge and his wife Elizabeth (Routledge) Routledge with their eight children, son in law and several grand children. They were joined in 1832 (still proving) by Robert Gray who married their daughter Mary Elizabeth Ann Routledge in 1835 at St Paul's now St Paul's Cathedral in London, Ontario. Unknown to each other but they did come from neighbouring counties sort of (Routledge from Bewcastle, Cumberland and Gray from Holme on the Wolds, East Riding of Yorkshire). Their daughter Grace Gray (my first born Canadian ancestor)  married the next new arrival in my family line namely William Robert Pincombe from Molland, Devon who was one of the children of John Pincombe (Bishops Nympton, Devon) and Elizabeth (Rew) Pincombe (Bratton near Minehead, Somerset). The only surviving child of Grace and William Robert was my grandfather John Routledge Pincombe and my second born Canadian ancestor. John married Ellen Rosina (Buller) Pincombe (Birmingham, Warwickshire) who had arrived in Canada in 1908 and their daughter Helen Louise (Pincombe) Blake was my third born Canadian ancestor. My father arrived in 1913 with his parents Samuel George Blake (Upper Clatford, Hampshire) and Edith Bessie (Taylor) Blake  (Kimpton, Hampshire, aka Ada Bessie Cotteril (Rawlings) Blake). So I am fourth generation Canadian on my mother's side and first generation Canadian on my father's side. Since I was born before 1 Jan 1947 I was initially a British Subject but grandfathered to Canadian Citizen as I was born here in Ontario, Canada and hence forever more a Canadian citizen no longer a British Subject. I did find that fascinating as a child. Probably many times a year as a child those emigration stories were talked about and all the names were familiar to me. 

But life was different for Edward's families in those days in the 1600s/1700s and a lot of time was just spent surviving I suspect so that the stories simply did not pass down through the families. Well educated many of Edward's ancestors were but they had to turn to the plow to grow food for their very existence and that was hard tiring work so that at the end of the day there just perhaps wasn't time to talk about life as it had been. The Dissenters paid a huge price for their dissent for sure but the gain was huge and my husband would have been celebrated by his ancestors I am sure as he made the kind of accomplishments made generations earlier by his ancestors in learning. His first ancestors arrived from Amsterdam to New Amsterdam now New York in the early 1600s so his first footpaths on this Western Hemisphere were his Dutch and French (Huguenot - it appears that dissenters attract each other) ancestors followed quickly by his German (Palatines and in a way they too were dissenters) and Swedish ancestors with his small number in actual fact of English ancestors (all dissenters initially) arriving between the 1630s and the 1660s primarily and to Massachusetts for the most part. Edward certainly had his own opinions and the genes were definitely there for that. 

A trip down memory lane does work very well to get the brain moving in the morning. It reminds me why I am doing all of this work - my mother wanted to write a book about her Pincombe family and my grandfather a book about his Blake family and so here I am in 2026 writing the books. My memory serves me well very often and both of these individuals (my mother and my paternal grandfather) repeated themselves many many times. In a family of seven children that is not surprising that repetition would be a pretty constant item on the menu. 

For myself I look back and I think why would they choose only Pincombe or Blake and of course it was the name that they were born with and so their thoughts centered on that surname. My mother also remembered the surnames of her grandparents and great grandparents but also included in that mass of data were family lore which I still investigate when paperwork becomes available that I have not seen but family lore does not always lead you to the correct place but then these stories were repeated to her and sometimes the repetition doesn't always follow exactly the same line of thought I have discovered. The intent though is interesting and I do like to not miss any possible leads when I am missing information. So I search those brain cells of mine for any tidbits that sit there dormant for sixty or seventy years or more and pull them out and look at them. I have a very lucky memory it appears as just little bits of conversation (tagged in a way by the manner in which my brain works where particular words cause a flood of memory). Yesterday I started writing once again in the Pincombe book and will continue with that today along with working on my lovely new file as I input the new information, if I do as I am being very selective. Mostly I am looking for anything that could upset the apple cart which is important for me to find that now rather than later!

Tea all drank and time to do the solitaire puzzles to really wake up that brain. The laneway is cleared and now the snow shovellers have come and gone and the path out is clear once again although I am not going anywhere. It is Saturday and I prefer not to be on the roads on the weekend. I stick to school times for my outings as there is very little traffic especially walking traffic!

 

 

25th British Isles Family History Conference

The BIFHSGO Conference was an outstanding success. Although I missed Friday's night's lecture due to other commitments (as well as any workshop I might have attended), the Saturday and Sunday lectures were works of art to put it mildly. Every speaker more than exceeded any expectations I had.

What did I like the most? Probably the lectures by Blaine Bettinger as DNA is my strongest interest at the moment. I like to do the tree research but mostly I like to assemble the DNA into my grandparent's likely donation to their children, my parents. I want to move backwards in the New Year and start to reconstruct my great grandparents and several of Blaine's lectures gave me thoughts on how to proceed with that. As a very early supporter of DNA Painter, I was pleased to see Blaine's approach to utilizing this particularly well designed tool for looking at DNA.

I brought up one question concerning a rather good 2nd cousin match that arrived in my Ancestry account. I was especially a good match with the range for my other three siblings being third and fourth cousin. I knew almost immediately that this was likely on my father's paternal grandmother's side and when the individual wrote to me I said that he was likely matching me in the Knight family. Being very new to DNA he thought a second cousin match was a second cousin and quite often it is! However, I come from a somewhat unusual situation in that I do not have any first cousins and most of my second cousins are half second cousins. All of my second cousins are known to me but one shouldn't be too boastful in that regard! However, I could not see any of my relatives who could have had a child in England that was adopted by a couple who went to New Zealand and that that child would be my direct second cousin. The age differential was also interesting. I have very long generations in my family with my grandparents born in 1872, 1875, 1876 and 1886 with the latter three born in England (lived in England to adulthood and my father was born in England). The 1872 grandfather was born in Westminster Township, Middlesex County, Ontario, Canada. He was the only child who survived to adulthood in his family and his only grandchildren are myself and my siblings. Mind you he had a lot of first cousins. But this match was definitely on my father's side as he matched several of my known Knight cousins. The tester was in mid 40s and I am in my mid 70s!

I mentioned to the tester that I was descended from a Knight line that had a second cousin marriage at the 3x great grandparent level (Ellis Knight and Eleanor Knight were 2nd cousins). This was the most recent common ancestor for most of those Knight matches. A number of my matches descend from Samuel Knight my 2x great grandfather who married Louisa Butt. Two of Samuel's siblings married two of Louisa's siblings making for lots of double cousins in that generation. Louisa Butt's parents were Charles Butt and Hannah Arnold (my 3x great grandparents) and fortunately they were not, as far as I can tell thus far, related. Hannah Arnold's parents were William Arnold and Elizabeth Molton and their daughter Sarah married a brother to Charles Butt (Joseph Butt) and in 1840 they emigrated to Canada with their ten children, Sarah died in childbirth a year later and Joseph married Ann Trewin in 1843 and they had eight children. Most members of the Butt family in Canada are probably related to me but that digresses. As a result of all of this intermarriage an endogamous situation has arisen in my Knight-Butt-Arnold family lines. That has mostly created this rather large match that I have with the tester. He is more likely a fourth cousin and does possibly share DNA with me on my paternal grandmother's side. I am still working on her line perhaps not enthusiastically enough as there is one large match with the tester that I can not match although likely on my paternal grandmother's side.

My paternal grandmother was raised by her mother and stepfather and really considered them her family. No mention was ever made of her actual father and other than her original birth certificate I would not have any particular clues as to his possible name. Her name at birth Ada Bessie Cotteril Rawlings and recorded on the census as Ida Rawlins (with her maternal grandparents in 1881), Bessie Taylor (with her mother and stepfather in 1891) and Edith B Taylor (working as a cook in the Manor House at Kimpton Hampshire in 1901). On her marriage registration she is listed as Edith Bessie Taylor. I do have matches in the Rawlin[g]s line that are not descendant of the Rawlings family lines. I would need to have a match with a descendant of a half sibling if I am correct in my thoughts on whom the father might be. Thus far that has not happened. The possible father was married three times with eight children.

The tester does not appear to match on my mother's side thus far and I have quite a few matches for her side on both of her parent's lines.

But I digress from the conference which was a wonderful event and I am looking forward to next year's event.

Ada Bessie Cotteril Rawlings aka Edith Bessie Taylor

My grandmother Blake was always a shadow figure in my life as she died 5 years before I was born. I knew a lot about her actual life, what she liked to do, her character and her known relatives. But when I tried to find her in the records  prior to 1891 that proved to be an impossible task. She just appears in the records in 1891 as the daughter of William Taylor and his wife Elizabeth. Searching for their marriage  around 1876 was also non productive. Then, bolstered by my courses at the National Institute  for Genealogical  Studies, I started collecting information on her siblings four in number although only three survived to adulthood. Buying their birth registrations led to the discovery of their mother  Elizabeth's  maiden name Rawlings. That let me find the marriage of William and Elizabeth in 1882. With that piece of knowledge I knew then that my grandmother had likely been born out of wedlock and was not likely the daughter of William Taylor. He would have been 17 years of age when she was born. I further proved this to be unlikely as he was some distance from Kimpton in this time period. Plus he was not listed as her father although did sign the marriage registration as a witness when Edith married Samuel Blake my grandfather.

I then purchased the marriage registration for William Taylor and  Elizabeth Rawlings and her father was William Rawlings. Locating Elizabeth on the census in 1861 and 1871 I found her mother Elizabeth and her siblings but could not find Elizabeth in 1881 and still can not find her. I searched on William instead and up popped the 1881 census with the youngest sons David and Sidney and a grand daughter Ada Rawlings five years old born at Ludgershall. Finding the birth registration for Ada proved  to be remarkably easy  and I waited for yet another certificate. Looking today at Find my past for my grandmother born in 1876 is interesting as there are seven hits for Ada Rawlings born in 1876 but six are easily eliminated because I know she was born 1 April 1876 and thus is the only record that matches.

For some reason I am completely untroubled by my discovery. Illegitimacy  does not hold any horrors for me. Finding my grandmother back in 2005 proved to be a catalyst for all the research that has followed. I discovered that you really can prove your line. Unfortunately it is not likely possible to determine her haplogroup. My father was her only child. She had one half sister but thus far I have not found a female descendant. The Rawlings line quickly fleshed out back to the mid seventeen hundreds  and a recent post proposes  a further jump back in time. William Rawlings married Elizabeth Lywood and the Lywood family has been well researched as a one name study by Warwick  Lywood  who has taken it back into the fifteen hundreds.

The last few 52 Ancestor Challenges have looked at the possible ancestry of my grandmother's  natural father. The father she knew and dearly loved was William Taylor and I considered  just letting her never be found by me in my recordings. The Taylor family was her family.  My grandfather  had very efficiently laid out an ancestry for her that appeared to be quite solid but I could not find a birth registration that fitted. Was I being unfair to her memory? I finally  decided after l revealed her ancestry to all my siblings and they were excited  that she was found that her memory was better served by truth than fiction. We love her just for being our grandmother  nothing else matters. A few Cotterill, Cotterell, Cottrell matches on the various databases that I have tested tell me I am likely right but I will wait to see if they contact me.

I am mostly  of the opinion that one's  familial ancestry determines who you are really. One's  genetic ancestry may or may not coincide but it can not include those wonderful personal anecdotes that make up the story of a family. We genealogists in this time and place have a wonderful opportunity to tell the stories of our families in amazing ways for future generations that gives flesh to the bones. Our DNA is also wonderful to include and gives us both recent and deep ancestry.

In total I have now found two illegitimacies in my ancestry. Both occur in the same line. My grandmother's  grandmother was also illegitimate. I suspect that her father was a soldier during the Napoleonic Wars. Martha Peck  married George Lywood a veteran of Waterloo and was the mother of Elizabeth Lywood married to William Rawlings. Not telling us the true story of our grandmother lost us the story of George at Waterloo. That story  has now returned  to our family history.