Continuing on today with the Andover Parish Records and I have now reached January 1679 with 3523 burials now in the file. There were 5387 baptisms by this date but I have a large gap now in the burials which I do hope suddenly appear on one of the fiche. More Blake burials including two John Blake with the notation that one was at Charlton. There was also a Robert Blake and several wives (Jone and Margery married to other Blake members) but not an Ann Blake yet (Ann was the wife of William Blake who died in 1697 and a potential ancestor).
Once I have all the burials then I can again start to look at the wills and see if they will help me to sort out the Blake lines in this time period at Andover. There are not actually a lot of them contrary to the usual opinion on the Blake family at Andover. I went into this expecting to never sort out the 1600s but now as I collect the data on the Blake family it does seem to be within my reach to sort them out. Having only the family lore that an ancient ancestor died at Old House I continue to plunge backwards in time into the 1600s. The last person to hold Old House was William dying in 1607. It doesn't appear to be mentioned again in the wills. It was a heap of stones when my Grandfather remembered it and not much better when his father first saw it I gathered. But that was already the mid 1800s and a lot can happen to a house in two hundred years!
Although the history of this Blake family has been published a number of times I have deduced that there are inaccuracies in this data (genealogy is interesting in that way; you can find all sorts of information sometimes on your families but then new information becomes available and you realize that the earlier investigator took the wrong track!) and have now taken my line back only to the 1600s while I delve into the possibilities of my line going back to Nicholas who died at Old House and is said to be my ancient ancestor by family lore.
The names of some of the old families are dying out and new ones are arriving although slowly. I recognize some of them as being from Abbotts Ann, Kimpton and Upper Clatford.
I seem to be between and betwixt these days as I am withdrawing from some projects and becoming more involved in others. I would like to work on my CG now and need to update my CV again for that. Not sure why I want to do that but if I am going to become involved in projects then I think that readers deserve to see that I do have the background to do some of the work that I am presenting.
No comments:
Post a Comment