I haven't looked for such a long time at the blog statistics. In total 513128 page views of the 2700 blogs that I have written since I created this blog in 2008. I have 103 followers. Average daily read is around 50 to 60 with last month having 1820 pages read. The Charley book is somewhat popular just at the moment. The blogs where I list a lot of records tend to be the most popular. The will transcriptions for the Blake, Pincombe and Buller families also very popular. I have received over 300 comments but often forget to check so that they can become quite dated before I respond. The location of some of my readers is a surprise although I understand that "bots" make up some of this total. The H11 work means a lot of Eastern European readers mostly Russian and the Ukrainian but lately Scandinavian as well. One can see the trek of my ancient mtDNA ancestor coming away from the Ice Refuge to make her trek to northern Scotland likely when Doggerland still existed. I have matches in Scandinavia in families ancient to the area there. Brian Sykes "Blood of the Isles Database" includes these ancient markers for H11a2a1 which I carry.
I created this blog as my historical memory of our trip to Salt Lake City Family History Library in 2008 in terms of looking at the documents. I wanted to remember my thoughts at that time. We were there for eight days and I spent the time photographing records many of which are now online and I have looked on occasion when my image makes me think I should! I never dreamed people would actually read it to be honest. Early on a reader sent me a portion of Augustine Question's will and I discovered that the Siderfin published history had been incorrect with the surname of Robert Siderfin's wife (my 6x great grandparents). His wife was Elizabeth Question not Blackford. That was handy as Blackford did not work in any historical searches but Question did. The blog does tell a great deal about me and it is interesting that an introverted person such as I am would have gone through life very quietly until the rise of the Internet.
I also encountered some resistance to my Blake research in Cornwall which came in as comments on my blog. All I do is collect information and publish what I find. For myself I would find it exciting if someone was able to lift records from ancient material that shed light on my Blake family prior to the 1300s when they are found in the Andover, Hampshire area. To have Breton ancestors would suit me fine to be honest. My grandfather (who lived with us when I was a child) talked a great deal about his Blake ancestors. For him, they had always lived in the Andover area and his DNA does tell that story of an ancient people in the British Isles dating back as much as 8,000 to 12,000 years ago. I did submit the yDNA to a study looking at ancient British family names so perhaps in my lifetime I will learn more than I know now. My grandfather and his brother were the first in their Blake lines to come to Canada although my father did recall that one of his Knight cousins went west. One of this uncle's great granddaughters tested on 23 and Me and we found each other. She also knew that some of her relatives had come to Ontario. This Knight family came to Canada in the early 1900s with my father and his parents coming in 1913.
So I will persevere and keep blogging until I have published all of this material that I have accumulated through the years. I do download my blog regularly but my daughter plans to keep it going once she retires. She is slowly acquiring an interest in family research and the DNA does tend to do that to people I think. First the DNA makes you incredibly curious as you see these matches pop up that fit the research and then you are sold on it. A day doesn't pass that I do not check the various testing companies to see if there are any new matches.
A cousin wrote to me from South Africa and I could see that he is matching me and other descendants of the William Welch and Sarah Cheatle family of Birmingham, England. They had identical twin daughters Anne and Sarah and both of whom had large families (12 and 13 children). The number of descendants is huge and a number of them have tested now. Rather then matching as 4th cousins (William and Sarah are my 3x great grandparents) the matches are closer to third and even second. The amount of shared DNA is amazing sometimes.
Breakfast time and back to typing the Siderfin book. I am inserting the Discovery Catalogue Information where the various records are transcribed just to aid in that research for anyone reading the book once it is published online. I suspect it will double the size of the book as I already have more pages than where I have stopped typing for the moment. I have a number of additions at this point in time not yet done. James Saunders felt that he had enough evidence to show that the Siderfin family was in the Luxborough/Cutcombe area of Somerset before 1548. With all the scanned records in the Archives it is now becoming possible to really look at that idea. He did the hard research back in the 1910s at Kew for which he is very much to be appreciated. Without the earnest dedication of family historians in the 1800s and early 1900s much of this information passed from family to family may have been lost until an eager PhD student in history decided to investigate particular items but they would not likely look at it from a family viewpoint.
