Joshua and Jericho

 The Ark of the Covenant was carried into the Jordan River and the waters piled up on the flow side and dry earth appeared for the Israelites to cross into the Promised Land. Ahead of them was the City of Jericho. Jericho is said to be at least 11,000 years old. In these modern days it is located in the West Bank. When the spies from Israel spoke with Rahab who lived in Jericho and protected the two spies from the government of Jericho, she spoke of God as He wanted the world to view Him. He had dried up the waters of the Red Sea so that the Israelites could flee safely from Egypt and the pursuing Egyptians. The success of the Israelites against the Amorites had also told the people of Jericho that God was great. Chapter 2 verse 11 "....... The Lord God is indeed God in heaven above and on the earth below." are said to be the words of Rahab to the spies as she protected them and told them how to escape the city. She asked that her family be spared when the Israelites came and the promise was made and kept because she helped them. 

The story of the fall of the City of Jericho is also an early memory from Church and Sunday School. I think in  my mind I want to think that God early on wanted to send His Son Jesus to us and that He promised it early on but the reality is that those prophecies are still to come according to the scriptures. I think quite clearly God wanted the world to know that He was the only true God who had created this beautiful world. He insisted that the Israelites pay perfect obedience to His laws or suffer the severe consequences in order that He would remain amongst them. 

Am I right that Armageddon has come and we have actually survived; that World War II and the demonic Hitler did not succeed in bringing on the end of the world. The signs were so very strong in Revelations as seen in the world at that time it appears but was it something that came into my brain as a child. Why do I think that? I am I think working my way through my thoughts in that regard and whether God meant that peace would come to all the world and all the countries would work together with their people to make this a perfect home full of peace. That satan and the satanists would be forever banished from our world. That three of the Great Religions of the World (known to me) worship the same God - Judaism, Islam and Christianity - can exist in our world because only God decides how He appears to us through the ages. Jesus came to soften the very strict laws of the Torah and Islam has its own God given existence. 

I was finding the daily readings although appreciated did not clarify items in my mind that were being tossed back and forth between my thoughts. Reading the Bible from cover to cover will answer my questions I think. Choosing the Revised Version Catholic was always a personal choice as it includes Books that are not in the King James Version. 

The great discovery yesterday was most interesting. This family is descendant of Robert Siderfin and Grace Kent through their son Thomas as my line is descendant through his older sister Elizabeth (Betty) (Siderfin) Rew. The match as fifth cousins at 53 cM is large (not huge) but does vary between 0 and 117 with 25 being the most common according to Blaine Bettinger's Shared cM Project.  However that 53 cM match is on Ancestry and TIMBER does reduce the number of cMs if the particular length includes a common area (i.e. common to the British Isles or a particular area in the British Isles in this case). There is a noted pileup area between 44 cM and 53 cM on this chromosome. I do have a number of matches but this one that is traceable is very useful as it again definitively supports the idea that this Thomas is a sibling of Elizabeth (Siderfin) Rew. On Ancestry it is a single chromosome match following later in the chromosome so part of the deletion could be the common pileup area. Rereading and saw that I had put fourth cousin but I am a fifth cousin to the person on Ancestry. Age is catching up to me for sure. 

Today is cleaning day one and it is the top floor. We were busy yesterday moving some furniture around to make it easier to manage and so a good day to begin the cleaning just to clear away any accumulation caused by the moving about. 

We are into a very warm week this week with temperatures well into the thirties and the humidex as high as 48 right across Canada from Alberta to Quebec. 

Solitaire puzzles to do.  

 

 

An amazing match

 I was working on the Siderfin book and I do need to revise it unless someone else does as the index is incorrect with page numbers. Sometimes it is right but I think in general the further you get from the front of the book the less accurate it is. However, I had a match with a descendant of the Siderfin family in Ancestry. Her daughter has now tested at My Heritage and I am able to see how much we match. The match is smaller (actually more than 50% smaller) and with the use of TIMBER I have no idea how large the actual match was but we share 4x great grandparents Robert Siderfin and Grace Kent and this new match would be my 5th c 1xr. Amazing that the tester's mother was so much larger. Occasionally I did inherit Siderfin matches that were larger but primarily my other siblings inherited those matches. 

Church today was one of those special sermons that  was delivered by the Right Reverend Peter Coffin who is filling in for this part of the summer. It is very pleasant to see him back in the pulpit as he was Dean of the Cathedral when we first moved from Dominion Chalmers to the Cathedral as Edward decided that it was time that he supported me with my Church as I had attended his United Church for many many years. I was extremely flexible on the Church that I attended as my Uncle/maternal Grandmother had been United Church and I went with them as a child when I visited which was often enough actually. I was familiar with the United Church. But I must admit I was happy to go although I had been attending the local Anglican Church at early service for quite a few years and then went to the later service at Edward's United Church with all the family. The readings at the moment include Romans and the sermon addressed this very interesting Book of the New Testament and I found it most interesting to hear his thoughts on Romans. 

Well time to run and get my exercise. I will continue looking at the new matches in My Heritage as I have already marked two new ones that are interesting but will not add them to my database at this time but this new one for Siderfin I certainly will.  

Another busy cleaning day

 The second day of cleaning completely accomplished and just the basement remains and will soon start the Robot vacuuming the rug. It is a nice way to finish the three day cleaning spree! The time commitment is just two hours at the most - one hour is done by the Robot although I have to prepare the area for the Robot to run effectively which takes maybe ten minutes. 

I finished looking at the four files created by Copilot and they are in good shape. The next step I will probably take on Thursday - my first working day of the week. Copilot will look at each of the files that are referred to by the Blake file it created just by matching the name on the file and the name in the file that it created. Within those files are lists of relatives in common/Matches and I will make a list of what to look for and then Copilot will make a complete list of those names along with a list of the matches that have those names in common. I should get a list of people who match within Blake and a list of people who match within Knight as well as a list of people who are matching Blake/Knight because I did not separate them. I will not have any decision made by the Copilot on this last group because it will be confusing and hence I will do that split although I could supply enough information for Copilot to do it there is a possibility of junk emerging so will avoid that. The human input is still more valuable in this case that the input from Copilot. 

The comparisons between "common areas" will also be made by me because that is indirectly what I am looking for in these sorts - matches deep into the past that take me back to Blake lines in Andover although few people do have that in their tree but some do. The 1700s was particularly small in my Blake line with Thomas Blake (born in the 1680s marrying in the early 1700s and having just one son Thomas and this son Thomas marrying in the late 1720s and having two sons but only one survived infancy and that was Joseph baptized in Andover in 1730 and marrying in Upper Clatford in the late 1750s. He married Joanna King of Upper Clatford and they had three sons. The second eldest died as a child (around the same time as Joseph) leaving the eldest son William who lived in Andover in the latter part of the 1700s and does not appear to have any children and the youngest son Thomas (born posthumously about five months after his father died) who married Sarah Coleman in the early 1790s in Upper Clatford. This very weak line in the 1700s is replaced by a very large line in the 1800s and up to the present. This Blake family of Andover/Upper Clatford is related to the Blake family at Abbotts Ann and I would like to determine the cousinship. I do know they are related through the King family because Joanna King's sister Mary King was married to John Blake, malster, Abbots Ann and all of this is mentioned in John's will in 1796. My thought is that John Blake of Abbotts Ann is descendant of John Blake of Andover who married Elizabeth (unknown) in the late 1670s and was the father of the ancestor of John Blake of Abbotts Ann and Thomas Blake mentioned above (born in the 1680s at Andover). This would make Thomas Blake who is mentioned in John Blake's will of 1796 likely 1st cousins ?x removed. I have yet to find anyone who descends from John Blake and Elizabeth (unknown) with a reliable tree other than my own line. A lot of people have these individuals in their trees but the link is questionable that they are using although by atDNA they are matching me (generally at least three of four siblings or more)! The fun is in the chase as always and as it turns out I do not have a lot of investment in the result other than curiosity. 

It is perhaps being Canadian that I do not particularly get excited about any of my ancestral lines. They are interesting even fascinating given my small footprint on this continent with my father born in England and coming to Canada with his parents as a child in 1913. Then my mother's father's mother was my first Canadian born in Upper Canada in 1839. Grace Gray (my great grandmother) was a first cousin to Sir John Carling heavily involved in politics in Ontario (was Upper Canada) initially and then into federal politics and was Minister of Agriculture hence the naming of the now torn down Agricultural Building and Carling Avenue. This area will now be part of the new Ottawa Hospital - Civic Campus (where I actually worked at the existing campus for six years). So first generation Canadian on my father's side and fourth generation Canadian on my mother's side and I was born before "Canadian citizenship" was created on the 1st of January 1947 so grandfathered to Canadian Citizen all on my own which I always found quite exciting actually. 

Why ever do I spend so much time on this? George DeKay is mostly responsible but there was a tug on my senses after my mother passed away which was a year earlier than George asking me to do a Pincombe Profile for the book he was publishing. My mother knew that I was so into DNA as a child in the late 1950s - found it so exciting and studied Chemistry with that on my backplate at all times. She reminded me of that in the late 1990s as she was going to the Family History Library and looking up items and wanted me to use this new thought that was breaking into genealogy with yDNA studies. I explained that we would need to test my uncle for that and that thinking was in the works but he passed away in 2003 (however a cousin of his did test for me) but I digress. 

The two elements came together with George DeKay asking for the Pincombe Profile and my mother's letters and discussions with me in that regard pushed me into doing the Pincombe Profile, joining the Guild of one-name Studies and reviewing what had been done with yDNA by Sorenson in the 1990s and early 2000s. As it turned out a known Pincombe cousin in Australia had tested his yDNA and I contacted him and an in-between person wrote back (perhaps that cousin had passed away no ideas on that as the writer didn't say that).  It was sort of weird so I just used his results comparing them to my uncle's cousin and they were a match and I just moved forward with the Guild study of Pincombe and Siderfin at that time. 

Who would of ever guessed that I would be so deeply into genetic genealogy at this time in my life! I had always said that when I retired I was going to knit baby outfits and sew clothes for packages going to the First Nations Reserves in my old age as my grandmother had done in her old age. I haven't sewed or knitted very much since I got into my course work at the National Institute for Genealogical Studies and graduated with my PLCGS in 2007 in English and Canadian studies. Funny in retrospect as I continue down this path really with my mother at my side leading me onward. Then my grandfather's memories came into play as I took on the Blake study in 2011 after giving the Siderfin study to a cousin in England as he wanted to pursue it and he was much closer to the repositories than I was in 2010! So Grandpa's stories of his Blake line tumbled out of my brain and I was into Blake and Pincombe pretty much 100% from 2011 on. I continue there actually. 

At 81 nearly I had thought myself to be winding down and I have quite a bit done with that but the intent is to publish all of this on Pincombe and Blake in the next two years and then move forward into Buller and Rawlings my other grandparents to publish their information - the Rawlings because my cousin John Rawlins sent me all his research perhaps thinking I have come to the thought in retrospect that he thought I would write a book. Amazing really as I go down memory lane  - I am beginning to think that is a habit of over 80 year olds.

Must do the solitaire puzzles, tea all drank.  

 

 

Continuing with Ancestry matches

 I did manage to complete all but the last siblings matches in my Ancestry File so will finish that today. A couple of interesting matches and I do colour code where I recognize the lines that merge with mine in the past. It is the trees though that tend to be the most interesting with Ancestry although the amount shared is also meaningful along with the number of chromosomes shared. Just FT DNA to work on today and will work on that. I have decided that with these new books I will set them aside at the point where I am getting ready to publish and then a month later do my final proofreading. I suspect that in my rush to finish whilst my eyes were still handling somewhat the amount of reading I was doing I may not have followed through on my lists for proofreading which my daughter helped me to set up. Looking at the list yesterday I had not checked off proofreading the Index. The names in the index will be as in the text but I am somewhat concerned about the paging as I did not proofread the index. It was just a moment in my early widowhood when I was using James Sanders book that the thought came to me to revise it and it was never really a long thought out project but rather I dove in and did it and then my cataracts were dimming my sight somewhat, I just thought it was aging, and I rushed to publish it. Even the corrected version was part of that rushing after I completed the Companion Charting Book. An apology and a mention to any users that the paging in the indexes might be questionable because I did not actually proofread the indexes against the text. At some point I will do that and republish (there is more material that I could insert along the way although may just put it into my blog and let someone in the future carry on with a new revision). 

Once I have completed pulling the matches and entering them into my database I will return to my latin transcriptions of the wills and make a final decision on where to begin the Blake genealogical descent table for the Andover Blake family (I still tend towards Robert but should I mention Richard Blake found at Salisbury in the 1440s from Ireland). I think one contemplates whether he is English and his ancestral line went to Ireland earlier although I do not find anything in the Calendar of Patent Rolls. That he arrived twice (10 Jul 1440 and 7 Sep 1441) is interesting. Historically speaking in the 1440s the Normans are fully in control of England at this point and Henry VI is King (1422-1461 and 1470-1471). He is crowned King of both England (1429) and France (1431). By 1447 the term "The Pale" first refers to English rule and it was pretty much limited to areas within Dublin, Meath, Louth and Kildare.Ireland is seeing a change with a decline of centralized English control and the Anglo-Irish lordships are taking over control of Ireland. It could be mere coincidence that Robert has named his sons as Richard and Thomas. But I feel that I should mention this individual. Perhaps in time more British/Irish yDNA tests will come forth for the Blake family. There are a number of founding lines known in England already and the Emigrant's Database between 1330 and 1550 includes 50  Blake individuals (including three female Blake where it is not possible using the chart to determine if they were wives or Blake was their maiden name) coming into Britain but not all have a location of exit (i.e. the country they lived in prior to their arrival).  Using Paul Reed's papers and my own transcription and a couple of other items that support one thought or the other I will move to this next phase of the Blake book. It does occasionally cross my mind that my two brothers having tested their yDNA and the result being Western Hunter Gatherer it would be interesting to test my grandfather who was buried in London, Ontario at some point but at 80 probably it isn't going to be me I am thinking. It is his memories that I carry within my mind; he definitely did a good job of placing material within my brain which I have retained through these years because he said it so often and I loved him dearly and his words remain with me on many occasions. I still dream about Grandpa and I can remember that last day together when I was just past my eighth birthday. I found it hard to believe he was dead but I had kissed him goodbye lying there in his coffin. I just didn't want him to be but children grow up and accept the loss of loved ones slowly but knowing they are with God. He was born in 1875 in Upper Clatford. I think the future holds great excitement for those pursing the past in their family lines. I am fairly content with the first one hundred pages although will be reading it again and again. I need to complete my footnoting (I have done quite a bit as I have moved along but will footnote items that I may have missed). Already there are nearly 200 footnotes on the first 100 pages. Amazingly my sight is so much better now and the time taken after the cataract surgery not overdoing anything has given that to me I believe. I am still amazed that I now live a life without glasses except when I work on the computer or read a book. Wearing glasses everyday, all day, for 78 years does form habits that take time to change. Particularly putting your glasses on every day. I noticed that stayed with me; that hand movement for nearly two years.  

The Pincombe book appears to have drifted into some resting spot but actually I do think about it particularly with the Pincombe matches on Living DNA. These are the descendants of the Pincombe lines including common ancestry further back than John Pincombe and Mary (Charly) Pincombe.  The six children of John and Mary Pincombe all married but a number of them emigrated to British Colonies. My line (Robert Pincombe and Elizabeth (Rowcliffe) Pincombe) went to the United States and Canada as well as one son George who went to Australia (at least one of his descendants emigrated to South Africa). But two of their children (Robert and Elizabeth Pincombe) remained in England with the youngest Philip having a large family but living in Somerset. Looking at the six children of John and Mary Pincombe a number of their grandchildren/great grandchildren emigrated to various places including the United States, Canada, South Africa and Australia. I will return to Pincombe probably in May sometime. The newsletter for May 1 is for the Pincombe study at FT DNA. I am contemplating that newsletter. They are brief at the moment due to my working on these books. 

A cloudy day again and the slight wind in the trees tells me God is with us; at our side watching and waiting patiently for us to do the right thing in the world. Love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength and love our neighbour as ourself. 

Soon time for breakfast and the first day that is devoted to research; cleaning is all accomplished. I also have the car ready for summer and my daughter's return to do her research. This will be a busy summer for her as are all of them. But she gets a chance to kayak and enjoy the world around her and I suspect she worries that I will not be always here and at 80 that is a legitimate thought for sure plus she is my caregiver. But I try hard to take care of myself so that I can still be here until I am not. The wonder of the internet means that I chat with my daughters every day and I am blessed that I am able to do so. 

Looking back in time

This is the day to create the last section of the Somerby chapter and it will look at the work of Paul C. Reed a well known American genealogist who published in The American Genealogist (TAG), Volume 74, 1999 an interesting article namely: Two Somerby Frauds or "Placing the Flesh on the Wrong Bones. My husband Edward being a subscriber through his membership in the New England Historic and Genealogical Society (NEHGS) I was able to download the article. Earlier he had published an article in the New England Historical Genealogical Register (NEHGR) which ia also downloaded and it was about Dorothy _____,. The key in our search for Shadrack Hapgood. This was one of the families that Charlou Dolan researched along with Blake. Finding these two articles when my husband brought my attention to them sometime after 2004 when my interest in family history suddenly developed thanks to my cousin George DeKay wanting a Pincombe Profile for the book he was editing namely: Delaware and Westminster Townships (two parts), published by the Westminster Township Historical Society, November 2006. My thoughts were pretty much on the Pincombe family at this point and I put the two papers into a folder labelled Blake because I saw mention of the Blake family. I was still working full time in those days and started taking the courses to complete my Professional Learning Certificate in Genealogical Studies (PLCGS) which I did complete in 2007. As always my first thought was to acquire the tools to do the Pincombe Profile since my mother had just passed away in 2002 and my maternal uncle in 2003. My uncle had given a package of his personal papers to my husband to write up his story. My husband passed them to me after 2004 and said this is your job and I put them in a safe spot as I needed to go back further than my uncle. 

Interestingly it was me that said we should do our DNA with Sorenson - my husband somewhat ambivalent at giving the world the knowledge of his genes thought about it for quite a while actually but I went ahead and ordered two kits and waited until he was ready to do them. He was in a quandry about his Kipp line as Isaac his 2x great grandfather had been born in 1764 in North East Township, Dutchess County, New York just as the Revolution was about to begin. His parentage was unknown but he was married to Hannah Mead who appears very correctly to be the daughter of Jonathan Mead the Cooper III who was definitely a Patriot in this Revolution. They lived next door or with Jonathan Mead and family in the 1790 census. But I digress. I said to my husband the best way to prove a line is with yDNA and he was hooked and off the kits went to Sorenson and then into FT DNA they were transferred as there was a setup to do that. Lots more testing and we were into the DNA at its beginnings. DNA would fundamentally change how people did their genealogy - a genealogy without DNA is no longer complete but it did take about half of a generation to convince genealogists of this case. Edward and I did give lectures at various time on DNA in our area. My results had been fascinating as I quickly found literally many many Pincombe cousins both in the Utah area where I knew they had gone (my mother mentioned that) and all across Canada and into many parts of the United States. The first database I signed up for was the first time I used it basically. I searched on my Pincombe family that had come from Devon in the 1850s and discovered a likely family but hidden behind the paywall of Ancestry. It suggested that I could sign up for two weeks for free, I went for the membership and was soon in there with the passenger manifest and there they were, my Pincombes. It continued to amaze Edward as I spent all of my spare non-working time on genealogy as I had spent the first nearly fourty years of our marriage with no interest in genealogy except I did help him when we went to repositories where he wanted to find something interesting he had received from cousins around the world actually. Edward's correspondence list was huge.

So one day shortly after I submitted the Pincombe Profile to my cousin George DeKay, I sat down and read Paul Reed's papers and was astounded as I discovered that the bits and pieces that my grandfather (and occasionally my father) had shared with me as a child appeared in print in these articles. It was an amazing moment that spring of 2005 (the profile was due and it was promptly submitted on time for publication) and it was one day after gardening with Edward that I came in and read the papers. I was still working then full time and would be for another couple of years. Edward had retired in 2004. I had decided to join The Guild of one-name Studies and being the sort a person I am had selected three study names (Pincombe, Lambden and Siderfin). They were just very interesting names Lambden and Siderfin and Pincombe is obvious (I thought they were all small projects but actually much larger the second two and I have set aside Lambden for anyone to pick up. The Blake study had been held by Paul Blake and being such a newbie I would not have even considering attempting Blake for sure. But here it was all that information about Nicholas Blake of Enham and it fitted the stories my grandfather told me in terms of the fraud committed. 

Today I will read through those papers as it is a long time since I have done so. I will also add in the section on Paul Reed's paper into the chapter as it will complete it. 

I couldn't decide if it was the weather, all that rain, but my eyes have been very strained but today that disappeared although will not spend too much time on the computer as it is cleaning day three and the upstairs which does take a good portion of the day. No idea why the eyestrain really (perhaps reading the Latin which I was putting a bit too much time into) but our direction ahead as a country continues towards diversifying our trade and it is pretty much top of mind (I was listening to the Premiers of the Provinces talking yesterday). It is good to see and we will be an even stronger partner on this continent as we build up our military and work with the Arctic countries of the same mind as us on our common need to provide protection of the Arctic. I think our focus is good and we need to continue removing any trade barriers between the provinces as there are lots of items that we could be buying that are home-grown. Re-starting some of our lost industries should also be top of mind I think and certainly getting those shovels in the ground to do the work that needs to be done. I was actually not opposed to the province buying a new airplane (surprising perhaps) but this is a huge province and the Premier needs to be more aware of what is happening all over the province (the availability of transportation quickly and with sufficient room to bring people along with the Premier is important (providing potential investors and customers with such extras is always a good plan). This is a time of growth for Canada as we concentrate on supporting the world being a peaceful place but always preparing to defend that peace. History through the centuries has shown that the peacemakers win.

Drinking my tea and solitaire puzzles to do. Today is Earth Day. Thank you God for this beautiful world. 

 

Wow, our little world blew up whilst I didn't watch the news

Did it all start because it was expressed that the United States did not want Canada to make cars for them. We actually had nothing to do with that; the car manufacturers are independent companies that decided to produce more cars here than they sold in order to make a bigger profit on the cars when they sold them in the United States because our dollar has been lower since the Stock Market Crash of 2008 and the car company cost of supporting the medical care for their workers is less here (so they built more here it was said to make a larger profit when they sold them in the United States I guess). Not sure that we benefited other than the jobs perhaps since the money was made on the cars in the United States plus the car companies cost us a lot of money in subsidies and the first $1000 a month of the pension of their pensioned employees I believe is paid by the province - so an expensive proposition car companies although I guess the loss of the jobs will be felt quite strongly. Suddenly we have car plants closing and jobs lost in Ontario because of that is a huge number. But that was just the beginning of the week it appears whilst I hid away from the news for the most part. 

What we need to do is to restore our lost industries; don't lose sight of what we need to do (washing machine, dryers, dish washers all sorts of small appliances are no longer made in Canada - we import them from the United States (Detroit I think for some)). We need to regrow our industries that were here when I was younger before free trade (on the one side free trade made us better friends for a very long time; travel to the United States from Canada for vacations became the normal thing to do (it is much warmer there when the cold winter descends here). We spent billions down there (not us particularly we probably spent in the thousands over time although we spent hundreds of thousands here for sure since we both worked and paid huge taxes it seemed!). But back to the car companies, if they want to sell cars here they will  have to build them here. Really we just need to knuckle down and get building what we need to buy. 

Our youth are a powerful working force and they have the ability to transition quickly to other types of work like my husband at 30 moving from Scientist to Engineering Scientist to Librarian all over less than a two year period (actually 18 months) which took him from graduation with his PhD in Chemistry to a Post Doc in Chemical Engineering then working at CISTI as a Librarian. It only took that long because he had to make decisions and then spend a year at school once again (no one supported him except me but I think the government has start up funds at least that was what I thought I heard). This is taking much too long; it is nine months since the tariff came into view. We should have birthed a few new industries by now and indeed we have some rapidly growing industries that have enlarged enormously over the last nine months. But we need to do more of that; concentrate on what we need to do. 

Then there is the separatist march in Alberta (read the Constitution and know that you are welcomed to emigrate anywhere in the world; the world is a friendly place isn't it?). Speak to the First Nations you are on their land. If you do not like it here and your stated preference is to be in the United States they are about to have a whole lot of jobs in the car industry down there! Best of luck we would have been in the United States ourselves (Edward and I many many years ago) but for a quirk of fate (Edward took the job in Ottawa rather than the one in Washington). Myself I am a happy first generation Canadian on my father's side and fourth generation on my mother's side - that is just the way it goes sometimes but I was quite willing to go or stay - it was Edward's choice although, to be honest I seldom make decisions of such magnitude, I did tend towards going south way back then (already my chronic arthritis was making itself felt in the winter and there was so much to see; I did love to see new places in my youth!); when you are just 28 years old the world is at your fingertips. Ontario has been a giving province to Canada for more than a century except for a short time during the time of the Harper administration when we had deficits. That is what provinces do who make a lot of money (the Founding Fathers made sure of that in the Articles of Confederation); the provinces/territories help each other when needed. The oil belongs to Canada (the company that mines it makes a good profit and pays the people who work for them) - it is in the purchase package for Rupert's Land including protection for the First Nations. You are Alberta by the act of the Canadian Parliament and really we should have just extended Manitoba's borders for sure and had just one big province there plus the First Nations have guaranteed rights as said. 

 Worked in the garden for an hour and completed another length of the fence line (not bad for an 80 year old). Gardening is a lot of work. It just isn't my thing to garden out there I guess although after Edward took ill I went out every morning and worked for four hours (I was only 65 then and used to doing a lot of exercise - hiking, canoeing, biking, running, walking) every day week after week whilst he got better that first time that he had problems. I kept that up actually, although after he had the pacemaker inserted he started to work in the garden again but not quite like he used to. So for a few years we worked together out there which was nice and I enjoyed it. But my knowledge of gardening is pretty weak and I haven't retained it all so just find that it is an enormous amount of work. So it is becoming more and more basic which works very well actually. 

Continued working on Chromosome 9 and there are 129 matches in the folder.  I am about half way through all the matches. These are interesting as there are many matches to Blake with an average length of 30 to 50 cM and I can tell the line that they come from with all of them pretty much sharing a known common ancestor and some further back (John Blake and Ann Farmer (married at Andover, Hampshire, England and lived at Upper Clatford, Hampshire, England  (my two times great grandparents) had 53 grandchildren so not surprising there are so many (how would you ever remember them individually!; the great grandchildren are in the hundreds and hundreds and the great great grandchildren in the thousands and a lot of them still live in England)). 

I also spent time on the index for the photo books. So a good day all around and today is Sunday. Another beautiful Sunday in God's world and it is 2 degrees celsius. I woke up to something banging I thought so will check the siding to see if a racoon has tried to break in upstairs. I do not hear anything like that though so probably not; was perhaps just the wind and that huge walnut tree in the neighbour's yard.  It was time to get up anyway I have a busy day planned - going to Church online, washing clothes, carting them up two flights and drying them on racks to increase the moisture in the air. Already there is lower humidity in the house. Then there is my research and the photo books. I got an email from Family Search to say they are already going to upload the two books I submitted last week. I submitted the revised Siderfin book (revision of my revision) along with the Companion Charting book and the email was asking if the one they had online was correct and I said no this was the corrected version. Just small corrections except for that one extensive correction replacing John 7 in the descent list with Augustine 7. Not sure how I missed that one actually but my cousin had given me the descent of her ancestor Thomas (brother to my Elizabeth) and I missed that correction. My eyes were starting to feel the strain before my cataract surgery and I noticed it when I started working on the Companion Book so made the changes and uploaded the new version to my server and mentioned in my blog amazingly over a year ago now. So the new version should be up. I just happened to see that they had put it up and quickly submitted the new one. I should have done it sooner but life runs away on me sometime and I am 80. Before I submit any more books I will take the time to read it entirely line by line after I finish and about one month later and then I will publish it. I actually never heard from anyone that there was a correction! I found the ones that I located all by myself. Enjoy the Charting book - it was fun but a lot of work. Since it is on my server and I have a link from my website it is always available but Family Search does collect family books so I thought I would send it to them. I also blogged that original book and no one but me spotted that error. Next time a second full read before publishing a month after I complete it! When I used to help publish there was always a second pair of eyes on everything; I just have one set!

Thank you God for another day in your World. Hopefully we can all learn to live together in this world and be friends. One more amazing thing with my eyes. I am suddenly seeing a more varied set of shades for each colour. Amazing really that my eyes continue to adjust to their new ability.  It always comes with a slight headache - amazing the brain is such a wondrous tool and we alone amongst all the world's creatures have such an advanced one. AI is meant to mimic the brain but it lacks human ingenuity/ability to move easily in different thought patterns making links based on our ingenuity which is the source of all the great solutions made in this world, which is why we must always be in charge. Can one duplicate that in a robot? I really doubt it; I think we can come up with, over time, ways to try to do that but the final control will always need to be a human brain which is more functional so long as we keep on using our brains and expanding their capacity. Having the ability to do that is very very important or we become just simple uneducated workers and that would be a disaster. 

 

 

 

The Hostages are free after two years plus

 Praise be to God and thank you to President Trump for his tireless work on helping to free the last living hostages held in Gaza and now the next step of bringing peace to the Middle East. Prime Minister Carney has flown to Egypt to be part of the discussion and thank you to him for that. It is important that so many world leaders are involved in this pathway to peace in the Middle East. 

A wonderful Thanksgiving Service at Church, a beautiful sermon and today is official secular Thanksgiving. When I was a child this was one of the big festivals in my childhood both at Church on Sunday and at home and because my father owned his own business and the odds were he would be working Monday we celebrated on Sunday as well. When I was very young and my great aunts and uncles were still alive along with my grandparents we would be so many people in my house celebrating Thanksgiving. My favourite part was always the sausage that stuffed the small cavity in the turkey. I loved sausage, cranberry sauce, baked potatoes, cabbage salad, squash and peas (I think there may have been corn as well but I am not fond of corn). I loved having all the people around me that I knew; it was very special but that is part of a big family for sure. Life moves on though and styles change and people are busy and families shrink. I made my perfect Chicken Stew yesterday and it was lovely and I enjoyed it very much. I was chatting with my daughter whilst I was preparing it as we do Yoga together using The Fitness Coach of the WII Sunday afternoons and it is all online. I do love online and one feels close to one's kin. My other daughter was working in the ER and that was maybe busy; I do not know. I admire her very much for the work she does especially the ER - it is hard work and very fast moving probably on occasion I am not there but generally it is very busy. People do not have family doctors like they used to and they end up in the ERs needing emergency medical care. 

Continued working on Chromosome 15 and decided to label the lengths of chromosome that were known to me as this is one chromosome that lacks two of the grandparents - Pincombe and Rawlings. I wrote an email to someone I wrote to about ten years ago now on Ancestry when our match first appeared (actually he wrote to me first). I think he matches on the Rew-Siderfin line and he thought perhaps it was that the Rew family were actually Rowe or vice versa but I have traced Rew back several generations and that was not the case but my 2x great grandmother was a twin and her sister had married John Griffith and I noticed the name Thomas Griffith in this person's table (one of their sons was Thomas Griffith). The match taken into Gedmatch was visible but matches with this level tended to be larger perhaps twice the size and he was sure of his Griffith line but I thought I would try one more time to see if he had resolved it as a Rew-Siderfin line would satisfy the Pincombe grandparent and it was not a bad size plus everyone but me matched it (at the moment that is the only match in that particular length - unusual for the thousands of matches that I have). We will see. This is a chromosome where I have at least 50 matches in the Buller line where I am pretty much the only one and they are very large (40 cM or more) - no idea who they are. There are just a few Rawlings matches but Living DNA has given me more and so I will be looking at them when I return to working on Chromosome 15. I suspect the layout is just fine but I want to verify it. Now that I am into the bigger chromosomes this idea of labeling the lengths will be helpful I rather think as I verify new matches. 

Today is basement cleaning day and I will soon start the robot vacuuming the rugs. I also want to do one hour in the garden as I did not do that yesterday. No work on the photo albums and I do plan on doing some of that this afternoon just to get myself back into that routine as well. The day will fly by unfortunately but this downsizing has to occur and needs to occur without a rushed timeline so as to preserve items that meant a great deal to Edward in terms of his children and grandchildren. I remember when our second daughter was a newborn and I looked at her face and thought how much like her Dad's pictures she looked from her very first days. As I look at both of my children they resemble their father's side far more than me; where was I but I was there carrying them within me and at their birth and sometimes I see little things that remind me of my family.  

Funny that I had no actual interest in genealogy up to 2003 - I loved to hear my grandparents and parents talk about their ancestors but in terms of putting on paper I had no interest and now my days are full of that and nothing else really. Mind you my days were pretty full of such ancestral endeavours from the early days of knowing Edward as he wondered so much about his Kipp family a lot of the time actually when he was not busy studying or working. It consumed him; he was so interested. The next Newsletter is H11 and I will begin to think about the yearly Kipp Newsletter as I just didn't have enough to put into one every quarter. I could have repeated all of his comments but they are in his blog which is on the website that he created. There they are in his own words and I know very little about the Kipp families in the present and even near past. More information further back as I looked up many items for him as we went to the repositories. He loved learning all of that but for him finding his yDNA led him back to Hendrick Hendricksen Kip of New Amsterdam/New York and then back to Amsterdam, The Netherlands was a high point in all of that for sure - it was fitting as a Scientist (PhD Chemistry) that he would be using the knowledge of science to pursue his family! When he decided to give a talk on DNA to the OGS group and he persuaded me to be part of that; I loved the way that he so enjoyed sharing his great find. Edward discovered a renewed great love for teaching with the Ottawa Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society (now Ontario Ancestors) and the United Empire Loyalist Association of Canada (Ottawa Branch and St Lawrence Branch) although his Loyalist ancestors ended up being few and his Patriot many along with Planters in what is now Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in the 1750s I believe would need to look that up. 

Edward (along with others) kept trying to get me to speak and I did sometimes but I really prefer my very quiet life and always have. I did do some volunteer (sometimes volunteered!) work but mostly for my children's groups or I helped at school one day a week for many years while my children were there or just something Edward really wanted me to do like volunteer Secretary for his United Church and  volunteer Treasurer for Camp Bitobi for a few years and such. I was also part of the area World Day of Prayer services which I very much enjoyed - in general the services were somewhere else but you only really hold so many World Day of Prayer services in a big city area. So a quiet life and once my health was sufficiently recovered and it takes a long time to recover from a breakdown (referred to as a Mental Illness by some amazingly who seemed to know more about my health than I did! but I look at it and I never actually thought that until I took the course on setting up Encounter Groups at St Paul University and understood better where I had been, what I had been through and how I recovered). I would say that I did not know very much about Mental Health issues and just didn't think I was that severely ill but it is surprising actually what constitutes a mental health issue. 

I was working at home for about a dozen plus years from the time we moved here starting a couple of years after our arrival (I had asked not long after we first arrived as it was recommended to me by the person who interviewed Edward for the job at NRC; they employed proofreaders who worked at home) whilst  looking after our little one as a proofreader and copyeditor for local printers principally. Although I did not start out with working for private printers, I was working for the Scientific Journals published/managed by the National Research Council but my job was cut by then Prime Minister Mulroney but I quickly found the job with the printers. 

Then I returned to work outside the home first at the Medical School in 1994 where I once again toyed with the idea of doing my Masters for my boss at the time (I had started to proceed with doing my masters when I was proofreading at NRC actually but I became pregnant with our second child (a wonderful surprise but at 36 (I was 28 when my first child was born) it was a challenge and I did not move ahead with doing my Masters as I felt she needed me)). 

I moved then from the Medical School to working at the General Hospital in 1996 which merged with all the hospitals in Ottawa except Montfort as The Ottawa Hospital with several campuses and over time I worked at all of the main campuses (Civic, General and Riverside), then a year plus at Health Canada. Once I left the area in terms of working at home I really disappeared in 1994; I just lived here and kept to myself and helped my children whenever they asked (I actually kept the score for my youngest daughter's baseball team, I  never missed a game rushing home in time for a quick supper)  and helped or went with Edward whenever where ever he asked - that was my life and I much preferred it. We lived a very quiet family life in a house that I am still in 47 years later although Edward did think about moving and he and the girls went looking at singles but the lots were too small for his garden and the bedrooms were so tiny for the girls. Here we remained for most of our life in Ottawa (just a couple of years in the south end before moving here much closer to NRC where Edward worked and the French Immersion schools were much closer to our house eliminating a long bus ride for a five year old with a chronic condition (asthma)). 

Tea is cooling, must drink it and do my solitaire puzzles. I certainly am verbose today; I guess it is the  holiday mood as one remembers past Thanksgivings and past times together as a family. 

 

Minus 10 degrees celsius, the polar vortex is descending once again

 Another cold crisp morning at minus 10 degrees celsius but feels like minus 20 degrees apparently. The skies are clear; great telescope weather if you do not mind the cold! Dawn is breaking now though. 

Yesterday I actually managed to get in a couple of hours of work. I continued with my Ancestry DNA matches getting them ordered and into my database for them. I use these matches differently from the other testing companies since I do not have any data other than the number of lengths and the total knowing that TIMBER has been used on the results to remove any parts of the length that are purely because of ethnicity in a particular group (in my case British Isles). It can have a huge impact for some - one of my known to me fourth cousins is reduced by 50% in total actual match and I have a number of other matches that show that to me as well. But the time tested trees in ancestry are so very handy to have along with the matching data that I am able to easily group many of these matches into specific grandparent/great-grandparent lines and even further back as I have a good sized Siderfin group and that was my 3x great grandmother Elizabeth Siderfin marrying John Rew and their daughter Elizabeth marrying John Pincombe, then their son William Robert Pincombe marrying Grace Gray and their son John Routledge Pincombe marrying Ellen Rosina Buller and the parents of my mother Helen Louise Pincombe. For all of these lines I do have a distinct matching group within Ancestry and they do make this easier with the Thru Lines now although I still maintain my own database because I have four siblings tested at Ancestry. 

No work on the books but I am thinking about them once again as the dogs fit into my schedule rather than my fitting into their schedule. They are content though but still look at the front door wondering when their family will come through it. Soon enough for sure. But it is a long time for the baby; she is starting to transfer to me just a little. Her thick curly hair means that I have to spend a lot of extra time drying her so that I do not have water all over my house. The closeness is bringing her closer to me than the older dog which doesn't get as wet with her straight coat and long legs keeping her up out of the snow more. But she is also a very loving dog and misses her family. They are very compliant now and bedtime is really easy and I only heard from the little one once at 4:00 a.m.

So today a few chores, it is collection day and it is paper this week so must get that out to the street. I only have two packages of recycled material from the food preparation so will wait until next week to put that out. I freeze it to make that easy to handle. 

Settled back into this routine of tariff. It is fraying tempers just a little but we will always be friends with the United States. You cannot have such a huge border and not be friends. Plus we are the same kind of people both the First Peoples who live on both sides of the border and the colonials. Although a lot of people other than Northern European/British Isles have come to this continent over the last four centuries the grouping of Northern European/British Isles continues to dominate that portion. In Canada the descendants of the early French Canadians continue to be the largest ethnic group (I think) mostly because they have moved west and east in Canada where some no longer speak French but I would still call them French Canadians and many of them have refound their French heritage because of bilingualism here. Although not official in other than a few provinces, there are French Canadian areas in many many of the provinces. For me with my English heritage we have very much disappeared into the Caucasian group where few know which aspects of life in Canada are actually British Isles English hence when BIFHSGO (British Isles Family History Society of  Greater Ottawa) was established as a genealogy/friendship group back in the mid 1990s I became a member (as did Edward but it was my initiative although at that time the idea that I would spend eight hours a day on genealogical endeavours was certainly not in my wavelength and I definitely continued to avoid it as much as possible until I didn't in 2003 when my cousin George DeKay dragged me into the business of all of that with his request for a Profile for my Pincombe family). I joined because it contained that element of England that I still clung to with memories of particularly my Grandfather who loved his home country but was also a proud Canadian (my grandmother also a proud Canadian had a different perspective look at her home country (probably because her parents died when she was young)). 

I feel privileged to live in Canada at this time as the First Peoples continue to be more a part of the governance of this great land that they have roamed for many thousands of years (13,000 at the latest sort of discussion in this area) but any earlier signs of their presence were obliterated by the Ice Age and the Younger Dryas periods of history on this part of the continent with the ice sheets extending down into the United States. Our Governor General belongs to the Inuit Peoples - I am really happy that she was willing to take that position in our governance and she has done an excellent job. That a group of First Nations ancestors crossed the Bering Strait 13,000+ years ago though seems to be a solid historical item. But the latest discoveries in South America show the presence of First Nations ancestors likely over 100,000 years ago from the South Pacific making that long journey across the Pacific which is amazing and it is their descendants who moved north into Central America and Mexico and the Southern United States but it is only limited by the inability to find information prior to the Ice Age and the Younger Dryas periods which obliterated anything that might have told us differently. Definitely the peoples of the First Nations have the knowledge of the past that we do not. Living with my grandfather certainly told me that as he talked about the various structures from his childhood living in Upper Clatford just across the London Road from Andover the much larger city near him. Stonehenge was known to him as a child and also he spent time in the New Forest area where his older sister lived with his Knight grandparents first at Turnworth (near Blandford Forum) Dorset and later in the New Forest Area. He loved the smell of the Sea he used to say as he spent some time near the English Channel (interestingly it is called the English Channel in England but in France it is called The Channel). Bodies of water can have different names for different peoples. Although, for sure, it is easier on the maps to have a standard naming perhaps but this is the modern age and as everything becomes more and more electronic we can just tap the name and see what other names have belonged to that spot in time. Turtle Island for one - the great continent on which we all live here in North America. 

So today I will complete my task on the Ancestry matches into my database. I hope to look at all the new matches and get them ordered into their database and then I can spend some time on the task of Phasing my grandparents and great-grandparents. The full task was last completed in 2019 for my grandparents as I never finished my project started in 2022 - life just became too busy with the Siderfin Books. I was doing it every year until then having first started that in 2014. 

I may take a peak at the Blake book and the work on the le Blak family of Rouen Normandy and the documents which I have now read but need to actually finish their transcription. We will see how the day goes.

 

 

The new way to put out your message

It is truly amazing the internet and how  much you can do with it. Myself, I was into computers in the mid 1960s learning Fortran first and then COBOL. Although I did use both in my working life, I do not now. But the internet lets the words of anyone travel around the world and they get to set the pace in a way. My setup of four newsletters four times a year has resulted in my having many emails a week with queries. I do not mind queries; I can not always answer them particularly on American research - my husband was the expert on American research because of his Colonial ancestry in New England/New York/New Jersey/Pennsylvania. On his father's side his ancestors are Patriots and came to Canada between 1800 and 1830, on his mother's side some of them are New England loyalists leaving New York to go to New Brunswick although a number of them were planters who went to Nova Scotia years earlier from the New England States. His mother's Link line were his only loyalists out of New York (Cherry Valley) into what is now Quebec. They left from Cherry Valley in the dead of winter on foot moving up to Sorel, Quebec where they found safety (mostly women and children). But he has written about all of that and spoken on it at Palatines to America group meetings which we attended for many years. With his more recent German ancestry (his great grandparents came from Germany in 1848 and 1867 to Canada) he fitted into the group very well as it is now more of a German ancestry group I believe. I always found it somewhat fascinating that the descendant of patriots would marry the descendant of loyalists here in Canada! 

But back to the internet and how amazing it really is. It provides a mechanism for revealing events as they happen and certainly the management of those events does show very clearly as you view them. I think that this was the first time I ever heard anyone mention in the moment as the event was occurring that World War III was a possibility. Mis-step can rule the day on occasion but definitely World War III would be nuclear and it would be Armageddon - we do not want to swamp God with so many returnees. I suspect he would not be happy with that.  The fires of Satan would certainly be full that day and for many days! But back to the value of the internet in getting a message out I certainly have found it to be excellent as a sounding board for my Siderfin books (although no complaints which still amazes me as I did postulate several of my own theories in those books although I had accumulated a fair amount of proof that allowed one to reach the conclusion especially with the aid of autosomal DNA match results where I was bringing Thomas back home to his family - lots of three way checks).

 As a child I heard so many stories when we visited with my Pincombe relatives and they did become somewhat blended. For instance I knew that we had cousins in Australia and than George Pincomb had gone there leaving  his wife and children at their farm just outside of London, England because his wife refused to move. Then there was a another individual who left his family and moved elsewhere in England because he had had a run away marriage but I never could remember the names for that one. Perhaps one day it will come to me. I also had a great grandfather who married a woman with an illegitimate child (not his; he was serving as a medic in the First Boer War in Africa and she was definitely in England) and he was disowned for that. But my grandmother did meet her relatives when her grandmother died as her father took her (she was the eldest child (the illegitimate child had gone to Canada by then)) with him to the funeral. There were so many tidbits that come back to me when I am working on the different lines. 

The Blake Book and the Pencombe Book are neglected for this period of time whilst the dogs are visiting me. They have been good except for the baby that barks. I have not been able to cure her although I have managed to restrain her somewhat by reminding her as she goes out the door not to bark. She stays up close to the house whilst she remembers but the desire to run overcomes her and there she is where she can see the very large dog two doors up and it panics her. Poor Little thing; so I knock on the window and in she comes - she knows that she has done the wrong thing. 

So today is cleaning day two and the first day of tariffs and the beginning of taxes on the products going to and coming from the United States - 25% tariff = 25% taxes (should be interesting as that is how I would do it). Mind you I suspect we may find it hard to buy the amount that we are going to tax as our purchase of American goods is going to be as close to zero as it can get (we do not like to do without American liquor apparently (not me, I do not drink or if I do it is just a small glass of Canadian wine) or Florida orange juice and there is more like dishwashers and other small appliances). Maybe we will walk more and save on gas until we have our new pipelines built so as to keep that low as well. Should be interesting but the people still buying Canadian goods going across the border will have to pay 25% to the wealthy tariff (is that what it is called?) so that the ultra rich can have their taxes reduced and help to pay off the trillions in debt that was created by the ultra rich being given a tax break back in this current President's first term. The American people will face higher prices apparently which really doesn't seem fair (those who are not the ultra rich although perhaps the ultra rich still buy groceries). But then with our dollar being depressed by tariff (and probably even further now that it has been put on) and threat of tariff we really can not do anything else; we need to support our people and of course recreate our industries that were destroyed by NAFTA/CUSMA if necessary). Although we were getting tired of paying a tariff on our softwood lumber which is really illegal under NAFTA/CUSMA.

The Gulf of America continues to fascinate me somewhat as it is surrounded on three sides by South America, Central America and North America. In some ways I am surprised that the name wasn't chosen originally since the continent got called America very early on when the settlers arrived (it is Turtle Island though; that is the First Nations name for this continent (Gulf of Turtle Island maybe?)). However it is also the Gulf of Mexico and probably there are portions of it that have names such as the Gulf of Cuba, etc. etc. Would have to check on that.

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. 

Prayers for the Los Angeles area of California

Completely distracted by the book and the le Blak/le Blake family of Wiltshire/Berkshire/Gloucestershire. Prayers for the people of the Los Angeles area of California. Prayers for the souls of those lost to the flames. How sad to see so many deaths and homes/other property go up in flames. The experience of parts of the country burning is an unfortunate reality here in North America - we have many fires in British Columbia and Alberta as well as Ontario and Quebec and the other provinces for sure. I was proud to see that our PM Trudeau is sending the RCAF with support material to help fight the fires and Quebec is already there with their water bombers. We do like to help and America is our neighbour and best friend. Coming together to help each other is something that just happens when it needs to happen (our line-men driving down to the Carolinas and Georgia to help restore power after the hurricanes is another example and you come north to help us when we are the ones suffering). We will always be there for our American cousins and neighbours. Of course our lack of heavy snow cover means that our forested areas will be a tinder box when the snows melt. It is somewhat ironic that this deep cold that we usually get has intensified and does make one wonder about the future for Mother Earth. Mother Earth knows how to fix the system but the losses are astronomical (life and property). We can not manage God or Mother Earth. We must follow the science where ever it leads us! It is interesting though that over time we have managed to create the ability to provide electricity and so can now weather out the winter and probably even an ice age in reality - the problem will always be food in the north for sure. Climate change is the new battleground and the Arctic is right in the middle of it. We must protect the Arctic and not abuse its natural control of climate.

Contemplating the le Blak/le Blake family continued yesterday and I mentioned that further down on the chart is the section with which I most disagree but in reality I have searched and will continue to search for proof of the marriages coming down from the top of the chart but with little luck but that is hard to determine sometimes as the records, if available, are likely in the local area records where they occurred if a written record exists. I have decided that I should reproduce the chart in text line by line over the next little while and discuss what I have found. Finding the record of John le Blake leasing property in Cam, Gloucestershire in 1332 was rather an eye opener. Interestingly the Calne Blake family is later found in Gloucester after the destruction of their manor house at Pinhills near Calne. 

The whole history of the Blake families of the British Isles is further complicated because there are a number of Blake founding lines. There were no surnames in England prior to the arrival of the Normans in 1066 at least not as we now know them. People were referenced by where they lived, a familiar characteristic or trade/occupation. That changed gradually in the British Isles over the next couple of hundred years with surnames becoming mandatory at a later date. But the surname Blake is found in England from the early 1200s on in the records in various places. I have published before a list of the Blake surnames on the Emigrants Database 1330-1550 and will repeat that interesting list here:

Surname    Forename    Nationality    Day    Month    Year    Residence
Blake    Peter        6    Sep    1463    Bedfordshire
Blake    Peter        20    Sep    1455    Bedfordshire, Dunstable
Blake    John    Breton    bef 16    Feb    1525    Cornwall, Bodmin
Blake    John    Fleming    24    Jul    1484    Devon, Exeter
Blake    William    Breton    4    Apr    1524    Devon, Morchard Bishop
Blake    John    Norman    18    Apr    1524    Dorset, Eastbury
Blake    John    Dutch            c 1524    Essex, Aveley
Blake    Patrick        7    Apr    1440    Essex, High Roding
Blake    John        10    Aug    1441    Gloucestershire, All Saints
Blake    Robert        21    Apr    1440    Gloucestershire, Holy Trinity
Blake    Robert        10    Aug    1441    Gloucestershire, Holy Trinity
Blake    Richard    Irish    10    Aug    1441    Gloucestershire, St Leonard
Blake    Alice        21    Apr    1440    Gloucestershire, St Nicholas
Blake    John    Dutch    11    Jul    1440    Hampshire, King's Somborne hundred
Blake    Stephen        11    Jul    1440    Hampshire, Millbrook
Blake    Gunna    Dutch    12    Jul    1440    Huntingdonshire, Huntingdon
Blake    Herman    Dutch    12    Jul    1440    Huntingdonshire, Huntingdon
Blake    Henry        aft 3     Dec    1450    Kent
Blake    Hayn        27    Sep    1456    Kent, Ospringe
Blake    John    Scot    26    Sep    1465    Lincolnshire, Rathby
Blake    Agnes        aft 29    Sep    1441    London
Blake    Henry        aft 29    Sep    1441    London
Blake    John        aft 29    Sep    1441    London
Blake    John        aft 29    Sep    1441    London
Blake    John        aft 29    Sep    1441    London
Blake    John        aft 29    Sep    1441    London
Blake    Patrick        aft 29    Sep    1441    London
Blake    Thomas        aft 29    Sep    1441    London
Blake    Walter        aft 29    Sep    1441    London
Blake    Hugh        5    Sep    1449    London
Blake    Adam        8    Aug    1456    London
Blake    Katherine        14    Jul    1467    London
Blake    Walter        18    Jan    1443    London, Billingsgate ward
Blake    Henry            Oct    1441    London, Castle Baynard ward
Blake    Henry        18    Jan    1443    London, Castle Baynard ward
Blake    John        9    Oct    1441    London, Cripplegate ward
Blake    John        18    Jan    1443    London, Cripplegate ward
Blake    Henry        5    Sep    1449    London, Farringdon without ward
Blake    John        11    Oct    1441    London, Queenhithe ward
Blake    John        18    Jan    1443    London, Queenhithe ward
Blake    William        18    Jan    1443    London, Tower ward
Blake    Lodwico    Dutch    24    May    1440    Northamptonshire, Yarwell
Blake    Lodewicus    Dutch    18    Aug    1441    Northamptonshire, Yarwell
Blake    Richard    Scot    15    Sep    1451    Northumberland, Newcastle upon Tyne
Blake    Philip        5    Jul    1440    Shropshire, Shrewsbury
Blake    Robert        28    Aug    1441    Warwickshire, Coventry
Blake    Robert    French    19    Sep    1441    Wiltshire, Great Somerford
Blake    Richard    Irish    10    Jul    1440    Wiltshire, Salisbury
Blake    Richard    Irish    7    Sep    1441    Wiltshire, Salisbury
Blake    Peter        10    Jul    1406    

I have not included a number of women with the surname Blake as at marriage in this time frame the surnames of women changed to that of their husband (the case with me as well since my maiden surname is Blake). I do have a theory though that my Blake surname came from a female Blake marrying into a family in Andover (likely at Knights Enham given the later proximity)  and proving that is something I do dedicate time to very often. The wills from the Blake family at Speen, Berkshire mentioning the Blake family at Andover somewhat fascinating in the mid 1500s. There would be an enormous benefit to my line to take the Blake surname of a wife way back in the late 1200s early 1300s given the preference towards the Normans in terms of land acquisition. It could also have created this folklore within the family that there was a connection to the Blake family eventually at Calne. All whimsical thoughts of course but interesting none the less. Proof being found is often the result of following such whimsical thoughts known as serendipity in genealogy. I see it as more of a "gut" feeling but serendipity if that suits is fine with me.

But that being said there were many people in England with the surname Blake prior to 1330 when the Emigrants Database begins. This list created from the Calendar of Patent Rolls for the times of Henry III, Edward I, II and III has many interesting entries. This is a portion of the database:

Number    Year    Month    Day    Place    Prefix    Surname    Forename    Location    Relationship    King    Volume    Page #    membrane
1    1230    1    30    Hertford    le    Blake    Willelmum    Hertfordshire        Henry III    2    353    7d
184    1274    5    30    Westminster    le    Blak    Richard    Rouen, France        Edward I    1    51-52    15
3    1281    5    30    Westminster    le    Blake    Walter    Oxfordshire        Edward I    1    441    16
5    1282    5    19    Worcester    le    Blake    Adam     Devonshire    son    Edward I    2    20    13
4    1282    5    19    Worcester    le    Blake    Jordan    Devonshire    father    Edward I    2    20    13
7    1286    11    6    Clarendon    le    Blake    John    Sussex        Edward I    2    327    5
6    1288            Worcester    le    Blake    Thomas    Worcestershire        Edward I    2    306    14d
10    1292    8    26    Pickering    le    Blake    Ralph    Yorkshire        Edward I    2    498    8
8    1292    3    24    Westminster    le    Blake    Thomas    Ireland        Edward I    2    480    18
9    1292    3    26    Westminster    le    Blake    Thomas    Ireland        Edward I    2    481    18
11    1293    3    26    Cambridge    le    Blake    John    Ireland        Edward I    3    7    21
185    1296    5    20    Roxburgh    le    Blak    John    Balymor, Ireland        Edward I    3    189    15
12    1298    9    15    Carlisle    le    Blake    Thomas    Cumberland        Edward I    3    359    8
13    1299    4    1    Westminster    le    Blake    John    Yorkshire        Edward I    3    402    33
14    1302    7    24    Westminster    le    Blake    William    Oxfordshire        Edward I    4    85    18d
15    1303    4    20    Beverley    le    Blake    Roger    Herefordshire        Edward I    4    134    26
16    1304    6    29    Stirling    le    Blake    Geoffrey    Ireland        Edward I    4    237    14
186    1304    8    29    Morpeth        Blak    William    Suffolk        Edward I    4    283-284    8d
17    1305    3    20    Westminster    le    Blake    Henry    Dorsetshire        Edward I    4    349-350    13d
18    1305    3    20    Westminster    le    Blak    Robert    Dorsetshire        Edward I    4    349-350    13d
187    1308    3    10    Westminster        Blak    Henry    Norfolk        Edward II    1    51    23
188    1308    3    10    Westminster        Blak    John    Norfolk        Edward II    1    51    23
189    1308    3    10    Westminster        Blak    Walter    Norfolk        Edward II    1    51    23
19    1310    6    12    Windsor    le    Blake    John    Yorkshire        Edward II    1    231    4
20    1312    8    24    Westminster    le    Blake    John    Shropshire        Edward II    1    487    21
21    1313    7    26    Westminster    le    Blake    Henry    Gloucestershire        Edward II    2    7-8    17
23    1314    10    16    Lincoln    le    Blake    Gilbert    Lincolnshire        Edward II    2    189    15
22    1314    3    12    Westminster    le    Blake    William    Herefordshire        Edward II    2    91    20
190    1315    11    1    Clipstone    le    Blak    Gilbert    Lincolnshire        Edward II    2    369    15
24    1315    9    1    Lincoln        Blake    Hugh    Northamptonshire        Edward II    2    350-351    22
26    1315    7    12    Westminster    le    Blake    John    Berkshire        Edward II    2    405    29d
25    1315    10    6    Walsingham    le    Blake    John    Yorkshire        Edward II    2    355    21
27    1316    5    4    Westminster        Blake    Adam     Devonshire        Edward II    2    495    23d
191    1316    3    21    Langley    le    Blak    Gilbert    Lincolnshire        Edward II    2    440-441    29
28    1316    8    12    Bentley    le    Blake    Robert    Hertfordshire        Edward II    2    588    25d
29    1316    8    12    Bentley    le    Blake    Robert    Hertfordshire        Edward II    2    592-593    17d
30    1318    5    28    Westminster    le    Blake    Osbert    Essex        Edward II    3    175    25d
31    1319    5    18    York    le    Blake    Robert    Norfolk        Edward II    3    368    13d
32    1320    8    8    Stratford le Bow    le    Blake    John    Hertfordshire        Edward II    3    539-540    19d
34    1320    8    8    Stratford le Bow    le    Blake    John    Hertfordshire    brother    Edward II    3    539-540    19d
33    1320    8    8    Stratford le Bow    le    Blake    Warin    Hertfordshire    brother    Edward II    3    539-540    19d
35    1322    5    6    York        Blake    John    Oxfordshire        Edward II    3    154-155    16d
36    1322    5    18    York    le    Blake    John    Cambridgeshire        Edward II    4    169-171    6d
37    1323    2    13    Pontefract        Blake    John    Oxfordshire        Edward II    4    257-258    5d
38    1323    7    15    Burstwick        Blake    John    Oxfordshire        Edward II    4    368-369    23d
192    1323    7    24    Faxfleet    le    Blak    Simon    Hampshire        Edward II    4    374-375    17d
39    1323    12    11    Ravensdale        Blake    William    Gloucestershire        Edward II    4    444-445    25d
193    1324    3    28    Westminster    le    Blak    John    Surrey        Edward II    4    448    20d
194    1325    2    10    Westminster    le    Blak    John    Oxfordshire        Edward II    5    136    34d
195    1325    8    8    Havering atte Bower        Blak    John    Norfolk        Edward II    5    158    32
40    1326    3    6    York    le    Blake    Richard    Buckinghamshire        Edward III    1    289    22d
196    1327    1    10    Kenilworth    le    Blak    Richard    Warwickshire        Edward II    5    346    2
197    1327    12    27    Worcester    le    Blak    Robert    Worcestershire        Edward III    1    203    1
41    1328    11    24    Westminster    le    Blake    Richard    Buckinghamshire        Edward III    1    354-355    12d

This list of 55 items sorted by Year (taken from a much larger list of 210 items found for Blake (various spellings) in the Calendar of Patent Rolls) demonstrates the activities of many many Blake members in various parts of England between 1230 and 1330. The yDNA results do show that there are a number of Blake founding families. 

I did not do the initial arrangement of the DNA results (Barrie Blake of Australia did produce that original sort) but I have tried to maintain his thoughts because he often was in discussion with various Blake lines and I have tried to simply update with respect in particular to the Y-700 etc tests done since this sort was made. Some of the groups are stand-alone and can clearly trace back to select areas in the British Isles. But the abundance of results does point to many Blake founders. 

Today will also be a Blake day although I will only spend part of the time on the Blake book. I also want to start once again re-phasing my grandparents atDNA and my great-grandparents including the more than 100 new matches that I have acquired since 2022 when I did not actually complete the task but was distracted by the Siderfin Books which I wrote (an update to James Sanders publication: History of the Siderfin Family of West Somerset, 1912, Exeter, England). The two books (amazing really that a 412 page book and a 170 page book update his 48 page book!) are available on my website:

http://www.kipp-blake-families.ca/elizabethmain.htm#SIDERFIN

Scroll down in the Siderfin section and the two books are at the bottom of this section. 

Up an hour already, it is minus 7 degrees celsius now and it is cloudy. Perhaps snow here but you get the best snow around 0 degrees celsius as our good friends and neighbours in the southern United States know well as they are being inundated with snow at the moment whilst we just have cold; when it is so cold it does not snow effectively. 

Teatime and then yoga and then breakfast. Another beautiful day in God's world on the North American continent. We in Canada feel blessed to live here by the grace of God and the kindness of the First Nations.