Having reached the end of the Buller wills and my thoughts on this rather ancient family as I discovered with my last post and delving into the British History Online, I return once again to my one name studies. In particular I have spent the last day or so writing up the Blake Newsletter for 1 April 2013.
As always there is an enormous amount of material that I could put into the newsletter but want to keep it at two pages and hence just the most important items find a spot in the newsletter. I could make it longer but will wait for other individuals to send me items which they might want to make available to other Blake researchers.
I have now managed to place all of the Blake wills into counties and other locations which include onboard ship, with their military unit (land based), East and West Indies, America, Ireland, Wales, Europe, Isle of Man, Scotland, and one interesting category "unknown" and quickly reading through particular wills I have not yet been able to place them in any particular region. This is nine wills only. I would estimate that it will take be between eighteen months and two years to transcribe all of these wills.
In the meantime I am also still working on my flat file in excel of all the marriages from 1837 to the mid 1900s. It is a slow process although I am now at Hampshire so about one third of the way through the various counties. There is still the enormous job of pulling together the Blake families on the census with their marriage records and the births/deaths of family members where possible. Then trying to link them back to the Parish Registers of the various counties. This is only England and I have still the Blake families of Wales, Scotland and Ireland to look at and compile although have done a little on some of them. Then moving out into the world Canada is hardly touched by me or anyone else although my line is here it is a very short time period as my father was born in Hampshire, England coming to Canada with his parents in 1913.
The USA Blake family is enormous although there have been a number of the lines published (a discussion of the erroneous work of Horatio Gates Somerby has been discussed by others and myself at length) and then Australia which has perhaps the largest group of descendants of the various Blake families of England along with New Zealand. Not to be forgotten as well are the Blake families in other Commonwealth countries who trace back to the British Isles. Along the way I will not be looking at other "Blake" families that have acquired this surname as a result of their surname being "anglicized" at some point in their history. I will leave them for some other brave Blake researcher of the future!
The snows are slowly melting away in our back yard and with spring advancing rapidly my time will soon be divided up between genealogy and gardening. The longer days mean less transcription from fiche for me and this past winter did not see me return to Abbots Ann Parish Registers. That is one project that I wish to pick up as soon as possible. I wish to complete all my Parish Register Fiche for Andover and environs in the next six months or so. That will be for the Blake one name study and for the Pincombe one name study I want to finish the Parish Registers that I have for the villages around Bishops Nympton with Rose Ash, Merton and Molland still to do.
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