Genealogy

The long awaited wedding day is now past and I can see myself returning slowly to Genealogy!

I have been in discussion with Barry Blake the last few weeks as he has taken over as co-administrator of the Blake DNA project at FT DNA. He has updated the webpages for this site and done a marvelous job.

http://blakeheritage.synthasite.com/blake-family-dna-project.php

I still have just the one match (8/12) on this site but it is an interesting match. I am hoping that Barry will be able to persuade this individual to test to 37 markers. With the extra 25 markers I should have a clearer picture of whether or not it is feasible that this person also descends from the Hampshire Blake family (or possibly the Wiltshire Blake family). Various posts later I am left with the thought that I originally had on the Blake family of Somerset. It is a combination of the spillover of the Blake family from Wiltshire and a Welsh Blake family that moved to Somerset. When Increase Blake visited a John Blake in Somerset in the mid 1800s and he learned that the Somerset Blake family shared kinship with the Wiltshire Blake family I suspect that over time these two Blake lines thought themselves related and their Welsh ancestry was lost to time. One individual feels that he can trace his line back to Sir Robert Blake, Lord High Admiral and he is R1b1b (the Welsh line is also R1b). His line back though goes to Norfolk which makes this even more interesting. There are already two distinct Blake lines in Norfolk at Wimbotsham (R1a1 and I2b1). These two lines are related although the original linkage is through a daughter of the Blake house which has resulted in two distinct haplogroups. This third line was located in another part of Norfolk and appears to go back into the 1500s as well.

I am hoping that the visibility of the Blake DNA project may encourage more Blake members to test and have their results put into the study. There are now at least ten distinct lines for Blake in the study and one could now relate to one of them and share ancestry.

I also said that I would work on the French Canadian ancestry of my daughter's husband's brother's wife. Half of the table is now done with our son-in-law's ancestry so just need to do the other half of the table. French Canadian ancestry is quite fascinating. I would only take it out to the 8th generation thus far.

I have the Christmas Tree all decorated and as usual it looks a little lopsided when I do it. My husband and children are much better at it. But it stood empty for nearly a week with all the rush for the wedding so I decided to do it today before Christmas is actually upon us. We are in countdown mode. We have purchased very few presents and need to do that by Thursday. Since I always did my Christmas shopping in the last two days I am not too perturbed but others around me are in a rush!