Sunday and continuing with Chromosome 8

 Another beautiful Sunday in God's world. The trees are covered with a fresh snow fall and off to Church online in a couple of hours. 

 Since there are only 64 matches for Chromosome 8 I did a little extra working on this length that appears to be either Blake or Pincombe. I have two matches that are definitely Knight and so part of the Blake grandparent line. One is from 23 and Me and the second is missing on My Heritage and perhaps deleted by the tester since the spring when I was last looking at it. I have nine matches on My Heritage that triangulate with each other on the Chromosome browser. One of the matches does point to Blake quite strongly. I have another twelve matches that do not appear to triangulate with these nine matches except one to one on occasion. I have one match from Ancestry (on Gedmatch) that triangulates with a number of these matches. Just trying to locate this match again on Ancestry as there may have been a slight adjustment of the naming of it as the two names that I am using do not bring up a kit. I will continue working away on these matches today as a few of them are from Ancestry and need to hunt out trees. I can phase these lengths with the knowledge that I have but it would be convenient to actually separate out all members of these two groups into Pincombe or Blake. 

It was a warmer day yesterday and we had a long walk since we need another snowfall to cover up the mess from the ice/rain mixture that we had since our last skiing. Last night we got about ten centimetres of snow so will see how that goes today. Perhaps out skiing at some point. 

As a country we continue trying to make ourselves tariff proof and this week our Prime Minister will be in China. Diversifying our trade is very much in our minds and we should have been doing it the last sixty years. But we also enjoyed our trade deals with our friend and neighbour the United States. So we continue to work away at that and it has been productive. This is winter in Canada though and everything is just a little more difficult with the weather. 

Time to make tea and then solitaire puzzles.  

Offline for a bit

Being offline is always an interesting experience; one is off the grid so to speak and it leaves you feeling independent of the world for a moment in time. But always close to God; God is in our heart and our mind and always with us in this world that He created. The winds were strong last night; you could hear them even over the sound of the game that my daughter and I were playing on the big screen. We are at Chapter 23 I think it was and there are 37 Chapters. I am looking forward to it being completed; I like finished tasks that is my way. Have I enjoyed it; it is has been interesting but I feel lost in it because I do not know the direction or the path but perhaps that is good sometimes to not know the ending. One must work through the various levels building and creating and one feels happy when each level is achieved which is like life really and so the games perhaps teach our young about life. There are pitfalls and there are successes and one learns from both. 

The Blake Newsletter is published and viewable. It was the usual chattering on my part about the Andover Blake Book but an email from a Blake descendant of the Mayo Blake family was part of the discussion. There is a truth in DNA that no one can deny and I think that that is part of our path in life that God has set us on. We are going to know the very truths of everything and then perhaps we can find peace in our world. Does truth lead to peace? I think it can if that is what is desired. When greed for money and possessions is prominent can peace exist. I think when the consuming desire for wealth and riches passes from our world then we can have peace. All of us are equal on this earth and all of us inherit this earth at our birth; that is what the Creator said and we must follow His commandment that we love our neighbour as ourself and that is truly the path to peace. 

Good work on Chromosome 8 yesterday although I am still ambivalent about this set of Blake or Pincombe matches extending from 78,043,790 to 120,188,941 on the chromosome. The distraction is the known family history of the matches which does tend to be northern England, southern Scotland and leads one's mind towards the Gray side of the Pincombe/Gray split. Blake and Knight are predominantly in southern England although the Knight family moved to the Lancashire area in the 1800s working in the woolen mills. The length varies between 20 and 35 centimorgans in the many descendants carrying this particular section of Chromosome 8. Some have deep American colonial ancestry with their origins unknown in their trees as written up (endogamy in the Routledge or Knight family comes to mind in this case as these families were very large and often enough amongst some of the earliest trekking off to the British colonies). Looking at the two siblings most affected the length of Blake is a singleton chromosome for both and the length of Pincombe runs from 60 to 140 centimorgans and 73 to 146 centimorgans for the second one. The other three do not share this length to any degree except for me and I have Pincombe from 17 to 73 centimorgans and 124 to 146 centimorgans. It is intriguing and does rather occupy one's thoughts as the various matches are regarded whilst I study the known information on each individual. But today I will just continue sorting because the internet is down for the moment and that lets me look at them differently actually yielding more insight some times. 

 Drinking my tea and solitaire puzzles. Time to get moving and do some exercise.  

Blake Newsletter completed and in for review

 I didn't have a chance to work on Chromosome 8 yesterday as it turned out and I started into that right away this morning and completely forgot my blog. As I took my breakfast break I realized it and decided to write it now. 

Another good skiing day yesterday (4.5 km) but today it is going to rain (or perhaps a little snow, it seems ambivalent in the weather forecast). Nevertheless it is very overcast and there is definitely melting out there. The streets are awash somewhat here and there. 

Good work on Chromosome 8 earlier today and I have continued sorting out the mystery matches that are either Pincombe or Blake - I found many kits submitted to GedMatch which has made that sort easier. John Blake and Ann (Farmer) Blake had 54 grandchildren in the mid to late 1800s and their descendants are huge and all over the world. Combine that with the Pincombe line and in a similar time period Robert Pincombe and Elizabeth (Rowcliffe) Pincombe had eight children, 34 grandchildren and many many great grandchildren also all over the world. The matches continue to flow in and sometimes in the phasing when you see Blake and Pincombe and just one chromosome length it can be a huge sorting process. Other times they just fall right into place but this particular chromosome does happen to have a lot of singleton matches with Blake and Pincombe!

I discovered that I have acquired a lot more Blake matches on Ancestry in the trees - a couple of years ago I went through and marked all the ones that were descendant in my line but the number has increased enormously in that time period so will be doing that over the next while as I work on the Blake family tree in the 1700s/1800s and earlier and later. 

Now must do my solitaire puzzles and then back to work on the matches.  

 

 

Always good to have the cleaning part of the week completed

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

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

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

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

  

 

Blake Newsletter is started

 I discovered as I started to write the Newsletter that it was going to take a day or so to complete so perhaps tomorrow for publication. Definitely getting older as time flits by without my noticing it really. We went skiing yesterday about 4 km in total; it was a good run and just a little cold not too bad at minus 10 degrees celsius. It is doable at that temperature. 

Continuing to work on Chromosome 8 and it has these interesting matches where it is either Blake or Pincombe without a good example in certain lengths and I am into another one of those lengths but today may solve it. I just haven't troubled myself to do so in the past as the phasing of Chromosome 8 is fairly straight forward but sometimes the matches do not lend themselves to the solution of which they are. 

Lovely snow coming down today and we will move it likely a little later as not enough for them to come and do it. I continue to look forward to moving as there is too much work for me in this house and with the yard outside. I just have to make that decision but a couple of items conflict it somewhat and once resolved I will be able to move ahead with that. 

Cleaning day three and it is the basement and the robot is already doing its job. I can hear it in the distance cleaning the rugs. Then just the dusting and the floor washing (which involves moving everything that has been cleaned onto the rugs) and the job is done except for returning everything to its proper place. Takes about two hours in total plus the 1.25 hours that the robot runs but I do not count that as I didn't do anything except set it up which counts as part of my morning exercise. An interesting way to clean and it is definitely the future as more and more people are busy working. 

Although I continue to watch the news I am avoiding thinking about it at the moment. Minds greater than mine are busy contemplating exactly what our direction as a world is. The United Nations was a good plan in 1945 and probably needs some tweaking in order to protect all the countries of the world that were established at that time or at the time of the fall of the Soviet Union which was entirely their own fault as they attacked Afghanistan and went bankrupt in the course of that particular error on their part. The World Court also a good idea but is sometimes conflicted where minorities are concerned namely Israel - it doesn't look like a minority but in reality the Israeli people have to deal with anti-semitism which is a worldwide attitude on the part of some people and they are constantly in danger and the UN has done little to help them from the very beginning of the creation of the State of Israel which can be compared with the pouring of billions of dollars of support into Gaza where there is nothing to show for that expenditure (so a failure on the part of the United Nations in retrospect). 

Whether a country is large or small should not really matter but we seem to be at this point in the history of the world where authoritarianism has raised its ugly head once again but democracies continue to be dominated by the people who live in them and we will just have to see how that flows. I had one interesting thought that Greenland which is Inuit primarily could become a 4th territory giving us then 14 distinct provinces/territories but they are their own people and protected by Denmark and NATO (but Canada is an interesting country in that different areas do have strong affinity to their countries of origin - for the First Nations Canada itself is their country of origin going back thousands of years and huge tracts of land in Canada do belong to the First Nations, for others it is their French heritage going back over 400 years with its settlements in the Maritimes and then Quebec in 1604, for still others (including myself) the British Isles is our country of origin going back slightly more than 400 years as they were on Baffin Island and in Newfoundland with fishing villages and hunting villages although did tend to return to the British Isles during the long harsh winters until 1598 with the first settlements on Baffin Island where the Inuit kindly received them). As a country our affinity as Canadians to countries of origin is part of our makeup and it could be that the Greenlanders would feel comfortable being part of Canada (no ideas on that as they love having their own country just like the Newfoundlanders did before they joined Confederation in 1949 but economically there was a benefit to Newfoundland at that time as we gave them Labrador plus other assistance). The Greenlanders have kindly permitted the United States to have a base on the island since the days of World War II but the people themselves continue to live the life that they have lived for thousands of years with their strong attachment to Denmark and also have a  connection to the Inuit who live in Nunavut which is their closest neighbour and one of the Territories of Canada. An interesting thought that crossed through my mind but I do understand their desire to be an independent nation with ties to Denmark and part of NATO. 

Tea drank and must do my solitaire puzzles as I wait for the Robot to complete its task.