Cleaning day One

An ever repeating sequence in my life is cleaning days. I do not mind cleaning it reminds me of my grandmother teaching me how to clean and I do try to follow her clear instructions. Life has changed though and now at 80 I do do things somewhat differently. She was a fascinating person though and my memories of her are very strong and clear in my mind. She managed though to say only certain things about her families leaving one to wonder many times. I wonder if she visited the area of Bermondsey where her great grandfather Christopher Buller had his Slop Shop on Tooley Street in Bermondsey. We were on the tour bus when I was looking out the window as we drove across the Thames from London and I just happened to glance up at the right time to see the street marker with Tooley Street upon it. Generally I can not read those signs but it was a large sign and the bus was right beside it and of course one is sitting up higher in a tour bus with huge windows. That was our first trip to London in 2008 (my husband and I). I had been in London in 2001 with my oldest daughter when we did my pilgrimage to Rome and then a side trip to London on our way home to Canada.  I had asked Edward first if he would like to come but he declined although he regretted that after our Tour of Europe as he saw little of Italy compared to what I had seen with my older daughter. He always wanted to go back and do a trip of just Italy. But once he went and enjoyed it he wanted to go much more often than I did. I wanted to see everything that I could see so it took a good six months to prepare for each trip and so it was generally every second year that we went. 

My grandmother did mention all of her grandparents - the Taylor grandparents were shoe makers/shop keepers and the Buller grandmother lived with her children except not their family. Henry Christopher Buller, her grandfather, had died twenty six years before she was born. My grandmother attended her grandmother's funeral not long before her father died actually and she had met her father's sisters at that time. Both of her parents had come from fairly large families. But Buller is one of my challenging lines which I will have a longer look at after the Pincombe and Blake books are completed. 

 I worked on Chromosome 1 yesterday and managed to get through to the C's. The number of matches is huge so it will be a while getting through this chromosome. However, some of the dust has settled on the common area as I was able to prepare a good list of matches for Buller and Blake as well as Pincombe (my Rawlings matches are very few actually overall but the ones that I do have are close so good coverage). 

The start of the work week is always interesting and today it is minus 24 degrees celsius with a wind chill of minus 35 to minus 40 degrees celsius. So a very cold day out there and I believe I will just look at the snow from a distance whilst I clean. The desire to go out in that is pretty weak. I did put the skis away until March when I might ski again - time and the snow will decide that. 

On the first chromosome at the beginning there are quite a few matches (as many as 40 actually but I did not collect all of them) that are early Colonial American and in the Blake/Knight line. I am still trying to find a match that will reveal which of the two. There is also a length on this same chromosome that is definitely Blake and both ancient and  modern so again I wonder are these the descendants of the Sedgewick family where Joanna Blake married Robert Sedgewicke  the 6th of Jan 1634 (old style) at Andover St Marys in Hampshire, England. Earlier in the history of Ancestry DNA I did collect five or six matches that were small but traced back to Sedgewicke (I do need to pull them up as I saved them when Ancestry removed the very small matches from their database). I will spend some time looking at these matches when I am doing the genealogy charts. Some really good lengths of Buller on this chromosome especially with my two Buller cousins testing recently (descendants of Clement Charles Caswell Buller (brother to my Edwin Denner Buller) and I already have two other descendants of siblings of my great grandfather Edwin Denner Buller so an interesting length of this chromosome is known to me along with two descendants of the Welch family which was the mother of Edwin Denner Buller. Not quite as large but in a significant place which has aided the investigation quite a bit from an earlier time. But the addition of the last two was memorable as it solved the problem on Chromosome 3 for sure. I do have eighteen known matches but this is a very long chromosome and there are spots (particularly the common area where more Known matches would be nice). Although time is providing answers that weren't there earlier. 

 Time is moving onward and I must finish off my tea and do my solitaire puzzles before breakfast and then cleaning. Exercises completed and a snack to fortify me until breakfast. Another beautiful day on God's world. An interesting discussion on the location of Heaven which I found very thought consuming. The scientist who discussed it is a physicist. I loved studying physics because so many of the early scholars were very religious and constantly brought science and religion together. I have always felt that the examination of the atom revealed God to us as it is so perfect and designed in a fundamental way that does make one believe very deeply in the presence of God in our world. Randomness doesn't cut it with me mostly because randomness is chaotic and destructive and the atom is perfect because it follows a logical course that is beneficial not destructive like plants and animals where the best combination of DNA is always chosen. 

 

Chromosome 5 completed

 Some difficulties in chromosome 5 as I did not separate out a few matches from the grandparent lines. Sometimes they were probably too small anyway other times just not enough information but I have kept them in the chart as I want to see how they correspond to other known matches. That will be something that AI will do for me once I have this chart ready to go. Could AI have made the chart? Perhaps in the future no idea on that although for privacy concerns in the databases I think that AI can not be just randomly used by people in a database although that is one item that these databases could offer in the future as part of their advanced searches such as Ancestry has now set up. Eventually I will use that because I can see some items that I wouldn't mind having more information as I pursue these early colonial Blake lines and as it turns out in I have also found that their are Buller/Taylor early colonial lines in America. I have the one known Blake line mentioned earlier (Sedgewicke-Blake in the mid 1600s in the Royal Colony of Massachusetts). The Buller/Taylor (and I do suspect Buller because like Blake they were out in the world in those early years) line appears to be a southern one in the Virginia Colony or the Carolina colony. 

I did start Chromosome 4 and there are  82 matches. This chromosome has eight known cousin matches several of them quite good lengths. Blake is heavily represented along with Knight, one singleton Rawlings and Dear back to my 3x great grandparents which was a good find. One match back to my 2x great grandparents Pincombe and Rew. The process through these chromosomes has been quite fascinating and I find myself contemplating doing Edward's grandparents with more confidence considering I do not have many of his closest relatives (sibling, sibling descendants, 1st cousins) but many many second, third and fourth cousins who were very kind to test for him in that decade before he passed away. I actually maintained all of the tests extracting the new matches as they came in since I was doing mine but he did all the work of actually looking at them and preparing charts (by hand) as he worked through them. I think he enjoyed that actually. I said from the beginning my genealogy would all be on the computer and for the most part it is but I still do have a couple of thousand fiche, books (not as many as he did - 2 bookcases (small)), DVDs that I purchased some on our trips to the British Isles and Europe. Records that I have purchased but I did scan all of them but did keep the originals if they were close family data. 

I also want to get back to the fourty binders of pictures and reduce them to just the family moments so that they are not lost over time. They are all scanned so in fact they would not be lost but it is nice to think that Edward's grandchildren will be able to enjoy the binders looking through them and perhaps his great grandchildren. His grandsons still miss him very much; he would have been so perfect with them but they are lucky to have a wonderful father who is also very good with them. As well they have a grandfather and a step grandfather that they both love very much and they were younger than Edward and will be with them for a much longer time which is wonderful. Creating the phasing of Edward's grandparents just seems to make it easier for me to do this downsizing. 

Moving on and must drink my tea and do my solitaire puzzles.  It is minus 26 degrees celsius in the great outdoors. The snow continues to be sucked dry by the cold air so not a good time to be wandering about outside here. The bare road is starting to show a sign that it is very cold out there. Apparently we are to get 10 to 20 centimetres of snow which will be light flaky stuff for sure in this cold if it actually falls.

Sunday today and Church very soon. I guess all the world excitement of the past week has distracted me from the actual day that I was living in.  

 

Always good to have the cleaning part of the week completed

 Research extends ahead of me for a couple of days and I welcome the time for that. This has been a busy Christmas and New Years with lots of skiing and fresh air just walking about. It has been pretty cold though although a warming trend is coming and with it a January thaw for at least a day or so. When we first moved to Ottawa there was never a January thaw; that was southwestern Ontario where the streets would run with all that lake effect snow as it flowed into the local rivers. But the weather here has changed somewhat over the past fifty years and hard to believe I have now lived in this area for fifty years plus. We came here with our toddler of 11 months; walking was in process but just short lengths at that time but quickly changed to running all over the backyard. I was so thin weighing 11 pounds lighter than I am now and that didn't change for a few years as I chased my toddler about keeping tabs on her. But it was a new adventure although I did fall ill about two months later but managed until I was better again a couple of months after that. I tried to do too much all at once. It is a dim memory actually those first few months here. 

Worked on the Blake Newsletter yesterday and will complete it today probably. I had an email from a descendant of the Mayo Blake family asking if I had any information on that line. Indeed I do not particularly but their closeness to the Blake family of Galway is interesting. The Galway Blake family is a huge family coming down through the centuries and written up by Martin J Blake (published in London, England)) in 1902 and 1903 as two volumes. Volume 1 begins around 1300 through to 1599 and Volume 2 records the years from 1600 to 1700. The books are available on Archive.org (https://archive.org/details/blakefamilyrecor00blakuoft/blakefamilyrecor00blakuoft/page/n1/mode/2up) . There are many descendants of this family and the yDNA study at FT DNA for the Blake family has a number of testers who can trace back into this Galway Blake family. Members of this family are found in many places in Ireland and in England. The best way to look at your own Blake line is to have a male descendant in the Blake line test their yDNA. There are a number of founding lines for Blake in the British Isles (including my line) and many of them can be found in the Calendar of Patent Rolls. I extracted the Blake records from this set of documents when they were loaned to a research at the University of Iowa and I did build a chart showing frequency of Blake in the various counties of England as that was primarily the focus of my research at the time. I did take on the Blake study at the Guild of one-name Studies in 2011 when it was left vacant by Paul Blake who had been the main researcher for Blake for many years in the British Isles as a member of the Guild. So my answer said all of what is above (briefly) and to consider that the Blake line at Mayo could be an offshoot of Galway even if the furtherest back known in their line was  a British military officer in Mayo during the 1600s when Cromwell was the head of government in England. Her thought was that her ancestor was descendant of the Blake family of Somerset (related to Lord High Admiral Robert Blake). I think she wondered if we shared Blake ancestry but my grandfather was always quite sure that we were not related to the Calne Blake family or the Somerset Blake family in the male Blake line. Interesting he thought that but people thought differently and learned differently in the late 1800s with rote being the prime method of learning. That means to me that your family stories were passed on by word of mouth generation after generation and that was why Nicholas Blake was discussed in the latter part of the 1800s even though he was just a small farmer at Knights Enham who left his will in 1547. It was this Nicholas who was given all sorts of different relations that created a stir at that time. An American, Horatio Gates Somerby, had created a story about this time period using Nicholas, giving him incorrect parents and siblings although some of the material was correct but mostly incorrect. Amazing that there would be such a discussion 350 years later after Nicholas' death but it was this style of learning that brought forward in people's minds the details of their lives lived generation after generation and caused a rejection by those who were in the know labeling Horatio Gates Somerby as a fraud who simply engineered stories in order to impress his American clients. Indeed the founder of the Blake family of Galway was Richard Caddell (Welsh and also known as Richard Niger) who used the surname Blake after receiving land grants at Galway and Mayo having accompanied then Prince John (later King John) to Ireland in 1185. The email was interesting since the Blake family of Galway was also at Mayo in the 1100s/1200s. But I do not do family research for individuals; I simply tell them what I do know and leave it up to them to do the research back in their lines. 

I continue to be amazed at the Blake autosomal matches that I have with individuals in the present coming down from early Colonials in the American colonies.  There are distinct lengths that fall into the pile-up or common areas of the chromosomes implying quite distant relationships but the size of the matches is sometimes rather surprising and one gets a notation of sixth cousin or even closer on occasion and I know very well that is not the case. The only Blake known to me that early in the American Colonies was Joanne Blake (daughter of William Blake and Dorothy Madgwick) who married Major General Roberte Sedgewicke 6 Jan 1634 at Andover and their children all appeared to be born at Charlestown, Royal Colony of Massachusetts in the 1630s/1640s. Joanne herself returned to England after the death of her husband in Jamaica but their five children remained in the colonies. 

Tea drank and need to do the solitaire puzzles and then breakfast. The days move on so very quickly.  

  

 

A busy Sunday

 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 only 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 most before as far as I can determine (except for the French Huguenot in the 1400s, the Scots in the 1400s); 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.  

 

 

 

Cleaning accomplished but not much else

Cleaning all accomplished and that was the two floors - lucky this house is small because I am getting older. Although at this point in time I can still manage everything fairly readily. I also cleared away the fresh snow fall; we are really welcoming it this February. Sometimes by February it can seem never ending but this year our snowfall has been very light and not one day below minus 20 degrees celsius yet. One wonders what March will bring. I would call this a London winter. And it is the first London winter that I have experienced in 49 years amazingly!

Today is the basement cleaning and the cleaning will then be all accomplished. Back to work so to speak.

I thought about Blake yesterday but actually did not do anything on the book. I need to start gathering data on the lines that I have not traced down. Most of them stayed in England with the exception of  the Sedgwicke family - Joanne Blake married Major General Roberte Sedgwicke 9 Jan 1634 at Andover. However Joanne returned to England perhaps after her husband died in Jamaica in 1656 and died at Stepney in London in 1667. Her children remained in Charlestown, Massachusetts Royal Colony and I actually have Blake matches (atDNA) with descendants of this family which is surprising although they are small but sometimes you can have this stubborn piece of Blake that just keeps on going (the matches are pretty much with all four of us who tested at Ancestry). There are in this direct path a couple of Blake-Blake marriages deep in the past (Nicholas Blake likely married his first cousin Margaret Blake (daughter of Thomas Blake, son of Robert his grandfather). I also propose that the original surname itself came from the marriage of a person without a surname (likely John) with a daughter of Richard le Blak when Richard le Blak was still living in Berkshire. Very ancient really and I do not see any matches with known descendants of the Blake family of Calne in my line although Jone Blake is an unknown The grandparents of Joanne Blake were Richard Blake and Jone (Blake) Blake perhaps providing that double lot of Blake gene pool that sends a duplicating portion of Blake genes down the line so to speak. Not sure why this Blake line did not really leave England until the late 1890s and into the 1900s (mine came to Canada in 1913 making me first generation Canadian on my father's side and fourth generation Canadian on my mother's side). My father used to talk about a relative. who went out west, had come to Canada before he did (he was actually my grandfather's first cousin and not his uncle but a first cousin once removed. I did assume Blake but actually his surname was Knight and I have since been in contact with some of his descendants as we match on 23 and Me actually. But the Blake family moved away from the Andover area itself but not out of the country particularly. There are still Blake families in the Andover area descendant of John Blake and Ann (Farmer) Blake and I have quite a few matches on the various databases since we have tested at 23 and Me, Ancestry, BritainsDNA, Ethnoancestry, FT DNA, Living DNA, My Heritage, National Genographic and Sorenson Genomics, The amount of data quite overwhelms these days and I have greatly restricted my collection of it. At least two of us has tested at all of these databases and in total five siblings have tested yielding tons of data for sure. Of value to only us really but I think for the most part the really interesting matching is between the five of us; I am least like any of them and the shared atDNA is amazingly spread from the least that full siblings can share to being quite similar. DNA is fun actually. It is possibly the best part of surname studies but then it was DNA that really brought me in after I had done the Profile for my cousin of the Pincombe family in Westminster Township, Middlesex County, Ontario, Canada.

On to the day; I slept in slightly and it is already 7:30 a.m.