Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Presentation at BIFHSGO and Blake marriages by Registration District

Spent the morning preparing my presentation at Before BIFHSGO this Saturday morning (October 8) at Library and Archives Canada (9:00 a.m.). I have 24 slides and another six slides that may answer questions that are asked. The time period is 30 minutes. The Guild of One-Name Studies has been an adventure for me. I joined way back at the beginning of my foray into Genealogy picking three surnames that rather interested me and about which I had acquired some information. The Pincombe study was from the beginning my largest study in that I had the charts from the earlier study. The Siderfin study had more correspondents from whom I learned a great deal plus I had a book published on this singleton family although through the ensuing years I have found a number of errors in this book which I have placed on my website.

I am now starting to look at Blake marriages by Registration District as I continue on the last six counties working up the data into a usable format for my purposes. The data is arranged in this blog with the Registration District and the total number of marriages between 1837 (if applicable) and 1951 in most cases although occasionally I have the data up to 1955. But this is just an overall look at the Registration Districts to see the spread of Blake over the entire period of Civil Registration.

Aldershot (Hampshire) 10
Alresford (Hampshire) 34
Alton (Hampshire) 24
Alverstoke (Hampshire) 60
Andover (Hampshire) 199
Basingstoke (Hampshire) 52
Bournemouth (Hampshire) 73
Bradfield (Hampshire) 12
Catherington (Hampshire) 10
Christchurch (Hampshire) 84
Droxford (Hampshire) 20
Eastleigh (Hampshire) 9
Fareham (Hampshire) 16
and this continues on.

My purpose in looking at the number of Blake marriages in each Registration District at this time was to ensure that I was correct in my thinking that Wiltshire would also have Andover Registration District and looking now at Wiltshire:

Alderbury (Wiltshire) 91
Amesbury (Wiltshire) 120
Andover (Wiltshire) 199
and this continues on.

The overlap is exact between these two counties showing Andover Marriage Registrations in both Wiltshire and Hampshire which is quite logical that it would be so. There are other Registration Districts in the Midlands where the overlap is more than two counties so that my totals that I have for each county are somewhat eschewed but looking at Registration Districts will solve that difficulty. There are of course a lot more Registration Districts but the idea of doing a one name study isn't to make it easy for you but rather to collect the data and crunch the numbers. Already the Surname Profiler does do this type of work with the census but I want to be able to look at all the Blake marriages in the UK by decade and where they take place. Eventually I will link this couple with their census entry (if findable) and then I can build the families back into the 1700s and earlier in particular areas.

Barrie Blake (my co-researcher on the Blake one name study at the Guild)  on his website has a lot of information on famous members of the Blake family although in time I hope to be able to have family tables going back to these individuals which will be available on Barrie's website http://www.blakeheritage.com/ . Thank you very much to Barrie for his extensive collection of Blake historical information. Although my name is on the one name study as the Principal Researcher we are actually three with Barrie's information providing an enormous amount of material for Blake researchers worldwide. Bill Bleak and Barrie Blake are the co-administrators of the Blake yDNA study http://www.blakeheritage.com/blake-family-dna-project.php and there is always room for more people in the study. We anticipate that there will be a number of founding Blake families and thus far the yDNA study is showing that indeed that is the case. Please do join us at FT DNA if you have a male Blake descendant who is willing to test for your line.


Once I have completed my initial project of collecting all the marriages and organizing them by Registration District then I will start to separate them out by decade beginning with 1841 to 1850 which also matches the census. In total there will be 11 decades to map and see how the surnames moved out from their 1841 - 1850 locations. I will then move to the Parish Records and using the parish assignments of the 1841 census place the results of my marriage surveys of individual parishes into the Registration Districts and thus work backwards into the 1700s and 1600s. It is an enormous project and will be years in the doing I expect. I do so enjoy working with numbers though and have assigned a couple of hours each day to work on the Blake family. Hopefully in another year or so I can be quite helpful to people looking at their Blake family in particular areas and help them to link back.

Since my own family were last at Eastleigh and then before that at Upper Clatford for 150 years and before that at Andover for nearly 300 years (that I am able to trace thus far) my investigations are less about my own family and more about the Blake family itself which has figured quite often in the history of the British Isles. I remain quite interested in our (my paternal line)  yDNA which continues to have only the one significant match with an individual tracing back his Blake line as Irish ancestry especially considering that our ancestry is within 2 miles of Andover for over five hundred years.

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