Blake Pedigree

The eight images certainly proved to be most interesting and they arrived the next day. Very fast service but the records person had already imaged them last year for another individual. That person had sent some information back to them which they included and I found it most interesting. The chart has clarified the Somerset Blake line and it will be interesting to find someone from that line who has a paper trail back to John (the first to live in Somerset) Blake who has tested their yDNA to see if there is a match with my line in Hampshire and the other individual who matches us 9/12. Having the same unusual haplotype is most interesting.

The Pedigree Chart itself is made up from the Visitations. I wondered if it would be or if it would be someone's personal chart that was maintained through three centuries. The generations are somewhat as has been published over time and I only challenge one entry. The visitation for Wiltshire shows the family of Roger Blake and it does not show William Blake Lynen Draper deceased in 1582 at any time for the children of Roger Blake. He is at Easton Town which is also correct but according to wills he is the son of Nicholas Blake and Margaret . However, I do believe that there are two William Blake's in this area - both living at Easton Town. I have two families with the father William Blake in this time period. There are two Visitations that show these separate family lines. I am slowly gathering up the land evidence to help with that as well.

I compared the wills of William Blake deceased 1582 and his son William deceased 1607. The land which William Senior gave to William Junior is also passed on to William Junior's son William so would appear to be the same family. All the names mentioned are those attributed to this family line. There are several more Blake wills that I need to acquire both from the National Archives and from the Hampshire Record Office. They will also help to clarify these two lines of William Blake but neither of them is the son of Roger Blake. The one is the son of Nicholas as mentioned and the second William is, I suspect the son/grandson of William Blake who was possibly a brother to Robert Blake (married to Avis Wallop). It could also be that Nicholas is descended from this William Blake as well.

Hopefully more transcription will yield an answer to that query. The mother of Nicholas was Jone but she did not mention her husband's name in her will although I only have a transcription from another researcher and I need to purchase that will from the Hampshire Record Office - still to do. My time has passed since I first thought about buying that will. I already have so much material from them that I have not yet transcribed in the early 1700s/late 1600s where I am sorting out my Thomas Blake son of John Blake son of William Blake. I am intently searching for another link between these generations aside from the Parish Register.

I have one of those documents that I am working on now. It is an indenture looking at the will of Joseph Hinxman Senior (deceased by 1685) and he is the son of Joseph Hinxman married to Elinor Blake (daughter of Richard Blake and Jone Blake). Elinor is a sister to William Blake who was the father of the William Blake I am querying as the father of John Blake/grandfather of Thomas Blake. My descent back to Thomas is through his son Thomas and then his son Joseph. Back to Joseph is readily accomplished with wills, land records and the parish registers. The two Thomas appear to be very straightforward. It is always better to have more than parish registers though for proving a line.

Blake family chart

I have heard back from the Wiltshire Record Office already and they have the chart already imaged so I have faxed in my order and have my fingers crossed that I might receive it very soon. I had an offer to image it from a Guild member but I am glad to have saved her that trouble. I have no idea what the chart will say as I have just a couple of comments that I found online and neither made much sense. There is a danger I think of interpreting it the way that you want so I shall be very strict with myself and I still need to be convinced that all the Blake families of Somerset/Devon and Hampshire descend from the Calne Wiltshire Blake family. Still need people to test their yDNA and I am hoping that more will do that. It would be nice to prove it actually.

I have a theory that a Blake daughter from Wiltshire/Somerset married into the Blake family of Wales and that they lived in Somerset. There may be a mixture of Blake lines in Somerset and the mixing would go back into the 1400s or possibly early 1500s. There are a number of Irish lines but I wonder if they could all be traced back if the differences would just be a matter of time and mutations. Again need more people to test.

I am up to 40 people now that I match at 5th cousin or greater on Family Finder and one at 4th cousin. I was contacted by one person thinking that he may have found a "Scandinavian" genetic component. That would actually suit my background although totally English my deep ancestry points to Ukraina for my mtDNA and Balkans for my paternal line. In both cases they could have come from Scandinavia to the British Isles in the Neolithic period. The second person, 4th cousin, is traveling at the moment but will contact me later. That sounds interesting since I have traced back on every line to my 4x great grandparents and further back then that on many of the lines. I have worked on many of the siblings lines as well. It will depend upon how much tracing back he has been able to do. Since I am almost totally British in the near ancestry (my mother, her father and his mother are my only Canadian born ancestors - I am 1st generation Canadian on my father's side).

More later on the chart; I shall try to present it in a meaningful way in combination with the Visitations - I have copies of every Blake Visitation as far as I can tell.

Blake family

I found a new website for the Blake family

http://mattocks2.wordpress.com/category/generation-17/111856-john-blake/

which includes the book that I have for the Blake family by Edith Bartlett Summer published in 1848 in the United States and she has her information from a book by Increase Blake published in the mid 1800s in the United States. It also includes reference to a chart by another author at the Wiltshire Record Office that is 12 feet by 4 feet and is the lineal chart of the Blake family beginning in the 13th century and continuing up to the end of the 17th century. It apparently states that a younger branch of the Blake family at Calne moved to Eastontown (near Andover) in Hampshire in the 15th century. Hopefully I can acquire this information and verify what has been written about it. I let the main Blake researcher know as well since he has an extremely good set of Blake webpages including our yDNA study on the Blake family.

After more than five years we finally have a "match" with our particular set of markers. Although it is only 8/12 it is remarkable in matching with the first five and then slight deviations on fast moving markers. Since I do not have any cousins in the Blake male line going back to my 2x great grandfather the closest this match could be is before that. When I look him up he appears to be from the Wiltshire line. However, he hasn't contacted me and since he doesn't match me closely enough I do not have his email. I am hoping that eventually he/she will extend their markers past 12. They have now tested their haplogroup and it is I2a (ours is I2a2) and being somewhat unusual in this area that was also very exciting news. This person does have the surname Blake as well!

When we go to England this year though we will not go to Wiltshire; that will be for another time. The funny thing was that Barrie Blake mentioned this chart as well not too long ago so has perhaps seen this new webpage. He hasn't seen it either and would love to do so. Perhaps it will be possible to get a photograph of it one of these days before we make it there.

We are starting to look at our other days in London. On our arrival day we were thinking of taking the tour to Windsor, Runnymede and then a lovely fish and chips dinner back in London. We arrive quite early at Heathrow and just have to figure out how to join it. That brings us then to Wednesday and we have Thursday, Friday and Saturday to plan although Friday is more or less planned with our visit to St Mary Magdalen Church and then walking around that area - Long Lane, Bermondsey Street, St Thomas Street, Tooley Street, Grange Road and Trots Lane (this one I have not yet found on the map). Then we will check out of our hotel and move to our tour hotel which is close to the Alfred and Victoria Museum which we will visit after checking into our hotel. One of the days we will visit the College of Arms, Temple Church and the LMA if there is time. I would like to look around Westminster Abbey, St Margaret's Chapel and Parliament square again and then to Trafalgar Square which we only drove through last time on the bus. Then we can also visit the Canadian Embassy and Canada House since we didn't do that the last time we were in London.

That still leaves us with one day and we need to plan that one. We like to go with a tentative schedule of what we are going to do although we can always change it.

Preparation for Kew

With just a couple of months to go before we travel to London and my one day at Kew I am starting to plan my time there. I had been thinking I would look at the 1911 census but the free time on Find My Past has meant that I have looked everything up that I had planned for all of my lines. My families are very small relatively speaking in this time period.

I did discover that none of Ellen Taylor's sisters married. They were school teachers in Ashton under Lyne. Her older brother did not have any children and her younger brother does not appear to have any children. That means that my Family Finder testing may not find any leads to these cousins. For the remainder I verified that Elizabeth Blake married to Allen died in childbirth in 1909. Charles Blake is also listed as dead by his parents when they reported their children born and living but he was very much alive in Africa! I found all of my grandmother's half siblings on the census and her parents/stepparent. That really doesn't leave me with anything else to look up on the census as I managed to capture all the Siderfin and Pincombe entries as well.

My next area of interest is wills and I wonder how many I can look at in one day. I have now made a list of all the wills that would likely interest me and others of only partial interest. I have highlighted the 54 with red that I especially want to see so that will be my research at Kew. I also have another 20 items that I want to look at so will need to get a Reader's Ticket when we arrive in order to order these items and hopefully I might get to see some of them before the end of the day. We have six free days in London but I only want to spend the one day at Kew. I also want to go to the College of Arms to look at the Blake crests. I have never been very interested in Crests but I have now found that the Blake family at Eastontown when they moved to Surrey used a crest that included the Billett, Durant and unknown (labelled so by the transcriber) crests by quarter. Since this is the first instance that I have knowledge of where a descendant of the Nicolas Blake family at Andover used the crest of the Blake family of Wiltshire including the Billett and Durrant family, it is of particular interest as I have not yet found anything on paper other than published books on the Blake family that clearly prove the connection between the Andover Blake family and the Calne Blake family. I am curious why they do not have the Wallop crest quartered as well but it may be that indeed my line comes from a brother to the Robert Blake who married Avis Wallop and whose images are forever recorded in a sketch held by the British Library.

We also want to take a tour of Buckingham Palace and visit a number of other museums/repositories including the Temple Church and environs. Friday is reserved for a visit to St Mary Magdalen Church at Bermondsey where my Beard, Buller and Hemsley families worshipped. St Olave is now gone as is the cemetery where my Buller family was buried. The Beard and Hemsley families were buried at St Mary Magdalen. I am curious if the St Olave is a hint for me to look for my Buller line there earlier. Perhaps we might get to the London Metropolitan Archives as well.

My husband has now found his 2x great grandmother known to be born in England around 1820 by the census. She is Mary Anne Abbs and she was baptized in 1819 at Aylmerton Norfolk. Now that he has a recent English ancestor he will likely have some items that he wants to look at as well. A trip to Norfolk might be too much this time but will save for another time.

There are many many museums that we want to visit in London as well. Yesterday the Queen was here in Ottawa and we went to the 12 noon celebration of Canada Day which she was attending. Amazingly we walked from the bus up to Parliament Hill and stood at the crowd control barrier right across from the stage set up on Parliament Hill. There were a lot of people already there but we just happened to have a place right at the barrier. The police cleared the road between the crowd barrier and the gates of Parliament Hill so that we had a clear view of all the activity on the hill including the arrival of the Queen and Prince Philip by Landau although they turned before they went in front of us. But then we could see them as they walked up the red carpet with a fairly good view (about 500 feet). Then as they left they drove right in front of us (about three feet away) as we waved enthusiastically with our Canadian flags to greet our Monarch. She was amazing doing so much at 84 years of age (and Prince Philip at 89). Hopefully she was pleased with the turnout; I have never seen so many people downtown at Canada Day noon show. There were large video screens and an excellent sound system so that we could see everything going on very well aside from being able to actually view the Queen with our eyes. God Bless Queen Elizabeth and God bless Canada. The person beside us had been at the crowd barrier for 2 hours before we arrived. We chanced to arrive just as a man left with his young children. Probably he found it too tiring to stand there with the children and the spot became ours. Amazing!