Amazing that I can miss items I sign up for

 Time flows so quickly even in retirement and a loss of internet meant I missed out on a webinar I wanted to attend. The phone just didn't seem to want to do it. However I will be receiving the Advent messages anyway as one could sign up for that without attending the webinar. They sound like a treasure to receive this Advent. 

The Reign of Christ service yesterday online was lovely; many of my favourite hymns were sung and the sermon was quite interesting. I do like receiving the Church Service every Sunday on my television. At 80 I have less and less desire to be out and about. It takes too much time out of the day. Even yesterday I went and got my COVID shot (I have never missed one actually) and as it was a fairly nice day I put on my snow boots and walked up to get my shot and two litres of milk as I was running out of milk. Grocery shopping one of these days but for the moment I can make do with what is in my refrigerator and cupboards. I am not a big eater but have managed to gain back the four pounds that I lost when I had the flu. So no more doubling up of meals - just three meals a day and that is nice and eating extra meals uses up my work time. 

Chromosome 1 was the source of my working yesterday and I got maybe a dozen matches completed. This chromosome does have a number of known matches so that I can pretty much rely on them to place the grandparents but there aren't many Pincombe matches known to me and the Blake matches seem quite ancient as I can only locate a couple of them. My largest match actually is on this chromosome and occupies a good couple of lengths but it is obscured somewhat by endogamy which means it is Blake mostly Knight-Butt-Arnold but nothing in the Blake line itself other than a couple of known cousins but they are not really large lengths. There are smaller known Blake matches with cousins. It is the ancient Blake that catches my eye so will put some concentration into that as earlier matching in Ancestry pulled up some ancient results with the Sedgwick family of Massachusetts. Joanne Blake (daughter of William Blake and  Dorothy Madgwick married 6 Feb 1606 at Andover, Hampshire, England) married Roberte Sedgwicke 6 Jan 1634 at Andover, Hampshire, England. He died in Jamaica, she returned to England and died in London but their five children remained in Massachusetts where they lived and their first known son was baptized 31 Mar 1639 at Charlestown. The matches were small and eventually disappeared from Ancestry. But there are a number of American descendants in the area of those matches on Chromosome 1. So I shall pursue this chromosome looking for possibly ancient Blake autosomal DNA. With a couple of Blake-Blake marriages in this line the chances exist but they will be very small and somewhat encumbered with other possibilities for sure; one does realize that. But 281 matches are a lot of matches and it will take me a bit to get through all of them in a meaningful way. 

Cleaning day today and it is the basement and the robot will soon do its work with me checking to make sure it is fully charged. The first robot in the house for sure. 

Time to make my tea and do my solitaire puzzles. Dawn is just breaking across the eastern sky.  

 

Basement completed and today the main floor

Yesterday spent a couple of hours working on the matches. I have this large group of matches (in Ancestry so TIMBER has been utilized before publication of the results) between 30 and 20 cM (about twenty) so is a pileup so to speak but not labeled as a common pileup area but all the members that have a tree have early American colonial ancestry and it appears to be Blake but that also includes Knight, Arnold, Butt, Farmer, King and a few other surnames back into the past. The matches in common do include mostly what I call Blake so it has been an interesting look at all of those matches. Will complete the 191 matches today that were assigned to the group Blake perhaps. We will see. I do have one in particular that was transferred to Gedmatch and the difference is significant. The match shows up for two of my siblings tested on Ancestry that are not listed because they are too small (9.8 cM and 11.2 cM before TIMBER) and the amounts for my other sibling who does match as well as myself is a decrease of 7 cM when TIMBER is applied so part of this length is considered ethnicity matching. Do they stretch back to the Sedgewick family of Massachusetts with Maj Gen Robert Sedgwicke having married Joanna Blake at Andover, Hampshire, England. That would be incredibly amazing. Their grandmother Jone (Blake) Blake was likely a second cousin to Richard Blake her husband and back just two generations Richard's grandparents were Nicholas Blake and his wife Margaret (likely Blake) Blake and they would have been second cousins as well. DNA does pass in sticky segments on occasion as this appears to be a known ethnicity area (at least part of the length) that does make sense. Anyway will wait and see. Earlier there were small matches (later removed when they upgraded) to the Sedgwicke family of Massachusetts. I did download those particular items way back as I tested very very early on at Ancestry and have been a continuing member of Ancestry from 2003 on. But one has to consider that Richard was my 10 x great grandfather so his descendants would be my 11th cousins and it is considered pretty remote to have a match. I do have known 7th and 8th cousins where the endogamy really shows up. But that endogamy is much more recent. But a sticky piece of Chromosomal DNA has the potential to travel through the generations but it will take very intense study to identify them for sure as belonging to a family rather than a genus. 

Basement though is done and time to move to the first floor for cleaning and that is today. Routine is the basis of all things and I love routine although I easily change it up to suit the day. The tiny little leaf is upon us once again as the tree out front looses its lovely tiny yellow leaves. It will soon be past and when is the hard frost coming we have waited a while for that. That is the nice part of being old is remembering the just under fifty years that that tree has been there shedding all over the front yard. There are a lot of nice parts of being over 80; being a hermit for sure is one of them but I was always pretty much a hermit so not a big change there. Edward did influence that to a great extent getting me out there doing stuff that he wanted to be involved in with him like the OGS and Church and of course our mutual love of astronomy but he was also into things like amateur radio - his life was full of happenings and that was when he was happiest for sure. I love going to Church; it is my most favourite outing to be absolutely honest. I love the music and the singing and the prayers that bring out all of those wonderful thoughts about our world. But I can do that at home now with YouTube and my Church online. It is great really. It is like being isolated in one's own little spot in the world just going out for sustenance on occasion when the food runs out.  

So I can see the books starting to draw me back in as winter approaches but also I want to set aside an hour or even two every day to work on the photo albums. They need to be ready for this new time and easier to manage and fewer of them - seven or eight sounds good. The first one is complete and I am tempted to pass it on as I complete them and must investigate that with my children one of these days. We chat every day and that is marvelous when you consider that my father left his grandparents in England and never saw them again; not even once. It was one of his sorrows for sure losing that piece of himself. 

Cloudy today so no views of Venus sad to say as it is wonderful to welcome the day with Venus above us sparkling just before dawn I notice it generally. 

Already completed the solitaire puzzles; brain woke up very refreshed and now it is teatime and then yoga and then breakfast once again. The cleaning will follow probably beginning around 9 a.m. 

 

The yDNA project for Blake at FT DNA

Good news once again. Three more hostages have been released in Gaza and returned home to Israel but their condition does not look good; they have been underground and treated very poorly for a year and a half. Compare it to the cheerful well fed look of the 183 Palestinians that were released. This treatment has been criminal towards these hostages - the honour of the world is at stake to even permit for one moment Hamas to get away with any of this. They must be punished for their crimes against humanity. 

The yDNA Project for Blake at FT DNA has been in place for quite a long time; I am not exactly sure when Bill Bleak first set it up but I joined my brother's results sometime in 2008 I think but did not take a lot of interest in it. I felt that Blake was just too huge a project to even look at it for a few more years. Then a Siderfin cousin of mine living in England wanted to take over my one-name study at the Guild and I gave it to him along with everything that I collected. I really must remember to upload the revised book (with my corrections) and the Charting Book for Siderfin to the Guild Library and the other two places to which I submitted it. But I digress; when I gave up the Siderfin study I began to look more seriously at the Blake study and contemplate, now that I had completed my training in genealogical studies whether I could, at such a long distance away from the record base, even consider doing a one name study. In 2011 I made up my mind and applied to do the one name Blake study at the Guild. There had been another Blake descendant who had had the study at the Guild for quite a while I think but he had stepped away from it at some point not sure when. I met him later when he gave a lecture to BIFHSGO a few years back and we chatted a moment and he asked my descent and I mentioned that I had managed to get back to Robert Blake who left his will in 1521 (in latin but I had transcribed it and I need still to go back and clean up that transcription) . Since my family never left the Andover area until the latter part of the 1800s when the eldest son of Edward Blake, John, went to Eastleigh to work on the railway. He was joined by my grandfather Samuel George Blake in the late 1890s when he completed his training as a blacksmith. The line at Upper Clatford was well known to me and back to Andover with Joseph Blake son of Thomas Blake. Muddled in my mind was the line going back further with a number of forenames including William several times and then Nicholas. Nicholas stood out in the conversations with my grandfather (he did die when I was just eight) quite strongly and it wasn't until I came into the Blake one-name study that I realized over a period of time why Nicholas was a subject of discussion three hundred plus years after he left his will stating that he was from Old Hall, Enham and naming his siblings and children of course plus his wife. The main thing that I knew about Nicholas was that books had been written in the United States that had an incorrect line for the Andover Blake family going back from Nicholas. He was unaware of the Blake Pedigree Chart that had been created by the College of Arms or the Blake Family Chart held at the Bridgwater Museum in Somerset. But likely people had started to come from America to Andover looking for their roots as that was a popular thing in the latter part of the 1800s. So there I was signing my brother's results into the Blake study where there initially were no matches; not even close. Barrie Blake, Australia, did an excellent job of arranging the various sets of data into "family" groupings and I have not really altered that very much other than changing the titles to fit the results as they have developed since he created the original structure. 

Fast forward to 2014 when we went to France for a three week trip which included Rouen. There touring the Cathedral in Rouen I noted that a Richard le Blak had lived in Rouen although finding much information has been very difficult. But I was involved in extracting Blake entries from the Calendar of Patent Rolls which the University of Iowa had put online for a period for a study they were doing. I downloaded every Blake item including various spellings and I had discovered a Richard le Blak requesting and receiving permission to set up a market in England in 1274. During this month I have assigned to the le Blak family, I want to look at the feasibility of this family being the progenitor of the Calne Blake family. From a view point of who they were; it is certainly a logical thought since the Normans conquered England in 1066. By 1274 they were much in control of everything although the British who were already on land and managing items had retained much of what they had and just changed the overlords.

There is a group of individuals who have tested their y-DNA and become members of the Blake y-DNA study whose results take them back to this particular area in France where the Vikings were known to have settled. There are not a lot of Y-700 results or perhaps not any I am not sure in this group although I need to relook at that the next issue of the Blake Newsletter. Many of them have family lore of being descendant of the Blake family of Calne. This family gradually, as shown by the wills, moved away from Calne and then abruptly moved after the destruction of their home at Pinhills near Calne where they were then located in Gloucestershire. So a varied location for descendants would not be surprising coming down from the 1300s. Several lines of Blake arrived in the United States in various places and that included from the Blake Somerset Family (I have no intention of putting together the information on the Somerset Blake family in my book). Thus far I can find only one Blake line leaving England in the Andover Blake family (a daughter of Richard Blake who married Major General Robert Sedgwick although he died in Jamaica and she died in London but their five children remained in the United States as they were adults or they returned to the United States); I do not know the Sedgwick family although there are a number of books published on the American line. There are no matches for my brother's yDNA results (I have tested two our of four of them) in the United States. 

So today I shall spend a bit of time looking at the Y-DNA results for that particular group in the FT DNA Study. The last time I looked I can remember thinking that overall the results pointed to a Viking/Norman ancestry. But that was back in 2014 as I have for the most part left it with individuals in the study to correct me if they think there needs to be a correction or tell me if they are making additions to individual groups. I am great at distributing the work if it possible! I always give credit for anyone else's work. 

Breakfast time, first Yoga and then to work. 

Blake - Sedgwick and autosomal DNA

One of the most amazing extras of doing autosomal DNA is proving lines or at least finding matches that can best be explained because of a paper trail. I have five Sedgwick matches on my AncestryDNA account and all are Distant Cousins (5th to 8th cousins). The Sedgwick connection goes all the way back to William Blake Andover, Hampshire, England married to Dorothy Madgwick of Overton, Hampshire, England. Their son William is my ancestor and their daughter Johanna is the ancestor of the Sedgwick family. Johanna married Major General Robert Sedgwick 6 Jan 1634/35 at Andover.

We would be 9th cousins which isn't too far off the estimated 5th - 8th cousins.  Now I am assuming that Ancestry organizes people in terms of decreasing shared centimorgans and these five matches can be found on pages 6,  7, 14, 15, and 37. Looking at all the shared surnames in each of these five it is likely that I have other matches with the two on pages 6 and 7. For 37, no other matches likely. But finding Sedgwick matches is quite phenomenal.

I have been happy with the trace back on Blake this last couple of years as everything fits together very well. Finding others descending from other couples in this line would be very interesting. I really haven't looked that carefully yet at my Ancestry matches because they were primarily Americans but they have Irish and English matches in there now so must have a look. My number of matches has nearly doubled in the last couple of months at AncestryDNA.