Forwarded on behalf of Dr Ian K Bloor: The Next Meeting of The Blo(o)r(e) Society The next Open Meeting of The Blo(o)r(e) Society is to be held on Saturday, May 4th, 2013, at The Church Hall of St Mark's, next to 211, Basford Park Road, Basford, Stoke-on-Trent, ST5 0PG. Anyone interested in Blo(o)r(e) Family History will be Welcome. Members of the Committee, and other stalwarts of the Society will be there, ready to help visitors, from about 10am until about 5pm. We'll be bringing a wide variety of research tools, and we will be happy to use our expertise to help you to start, to re-start, or to continue your own exploration of your Blo(o)r(e) Family History. As an added incentive, there will be Tea, Coffee, Juice and biscuits to help your concentration, and we can keep children amused too. It may be worth mentioning that you don't have to be called Blo(o)r(e) to get through the door. In fact, less than half of our members are called Blo(o)r(e), and at least four of them don't seem to have any Blo(o)r(e)s in their Family Trees. If you would like to know more, contact Ian Bloor on 01270 811 260 or visit www.bloor.org The Blo(o)r(e) Society sprang into life in 1996, as a One-Name genealogical research group looking into the origins of Bloors, Bloores and Blores in North Staffordshire. We fairly quickly realised that some Blewers and Blowers were also part of the 'clan', and we're aware of at least one family who are listed as Bloors in censuses in Stoke-on-Trent, but became Blewers after they moved to Birmingham, and eventually appear as Bluers in censuses in Scotland. We had our first meeting at the Epworth Street Methodist Church, in Stoke, and we've had Open Meetings every year since then, mostly in and around Stoke-on-Trent, but occasionally further afield: but not much further afield, because 50% of the Blo(o)r(e)s in Britain, live within 50 miles of Stoke Station. The other 50% are spread all over the surface of the Earth, and we have links with Blo(o)r(e) descendants on every continent except Antarctica. We've spent that last 17 years gathering information about Blo(o)r(e) ancestors from the 334 Blo(o)r(e) descendants who have joined the Society, and from about the same number who haven't joined. Most of this information has been checked, and re-checked, and sifted and sorted by our team of expert family historians, and now forms the basis for our collection of more than 80 separate Blo(o)r(e) family trees. A few of these trees go back into the 17th Century, more back into the 18th Century, and the rest back into the 19th Century. Our task now is to try to link these trees together, to try to identify the true earliest known ancestors of each group, while we keep gathering more information, and fitting living Blo(o)r(e) descendants into existing trees or, which is even more exciting, discovering Blo(o)r(e)s who belong to a currently unknown Blo(o)r(e) tree. The technique that is allowing us to establish probably links between our trees is the use of DNA analysis. Y-chromosome DNA is passed down, basically unchanged, from father to son, and so on, which means that, apart from random, small changes that occur from time to time, I have the same Y-chromosome 'signature' as my father, his father, his father, his father, and so on back for a long, long time. My brothers (should) have the same DNA signature, and my male cousins should have the same signature. In fact any male descended from my earliest known ancestor should have the same DNA as my father gave to me. Using DNA samples from males from some of our Blo(o)r(e) trees, we have been able to identify several groups of trees where the Y-chromosome DNA is very similar, or actually identical, meaning that thr trees in each group are highly likely to have a single common ancestor – although this ancestor may have lived several hundred years ago, perhaps even before there are any records to identify exactly who he was. Nevertheless, this is what we are trying to do. One of the consequences of all our research, is that we discover interesting facts about interesting Blo(o)r(e)s, some of them famous, or infamous for one reason or another, but many interesting simply because they have left records of their 'normal', 'hum-drum', 'everyday' lives, in the form of letters, photographs or notebooks that have survived all the 'rubbish disposal', clearing up after funerals, and house-moves that so often mean that family 'gems' are lost for ever. One of our objectives, as a Society, is "to chronicle the lives of every Blo(o)r(e) that has ever lived"- a task that I can only imagine being completed in the distant future. But we have made a start. If you know someone who has a Blo(o)r(e) in their tree – please tell them about the Meeting.