Continuing with the Andover Parish Register and I have reached 4865 burials by December 1692. There are several Blake burials that I would have expected to find here and do. I have their wills and need to transcribe them but will wait until I reach the mid 1700s in the Andover Register so that I have all the Blake names in these registers.
Many of the old families are still here but there are new names and Durnford is an interesting one. My 4x great grandmother married to John Butt was Jane Durnford. She was born at Winterborne Clenstone in 1771 according to another researcher. This Durnford family is not found commonly in this Dorset area prior to this time but could they have come from the Andover area? It is an intriguing thought.
These families are tied to the land as farmers/agricultural labourers in the mid 1700s but remembering how manors work they could have been moved by the lord of the manor between his estates. The time period between 1771 and 1845 when my Edward Blake is born is not that great in terms of people remembering each other and I may just extract the Durnford entries into a chart to see if I can discover any interesting marriages. I do not know where the parents of Jane Durnford (Thomas Durnford and Mary Ball) married. As far as I can tell it was not at Winterborne Clenstone and Jane was baptized at Winterborne Stickland. Unfortunately the records for Winterborne Stickland are still not on the OPC page (I do Winterborne Clenstone for the OPC Dorset site).
I will continue transcribing the Andover Parish Registers and I am currently on the 3rd fiche of the 4th register (all burials). I should finish all four fiche by mid-week. Then I begin parish register 5 and that is the christenings and marriages from 1685 to 1701. The burial register in this case goes to 1714.
At some point in the past I thought I found the burial of a Thomas Blake in this burial register. Now that I have just two candidates in this register it would be interesting to see if I am remembering correctly. Now that I am reconsidering Thomas Blake I am realizing that Thomas b 1761 could be my ancestor and that he married when he was older so that his death in 1714 does seem somewhat more reasonable (53 years) than the death of Thomas Blake b 1785 at 29 years of age. Finding the burial again could be most interesting as sudden death at 29 years of age was not that unusual. Joseph Blake was only 37 when he died (my 4x great grandfather). Both he and his eldest son died within 11 days of each other (the father and then the son). The register doesn't say that it was an accident in either case but Joseph was a farmer and his son Thomas would have been old enough to be helping him. My ancestor, also named Thomas, was born posthumously five months later.
No comments:
Post a Comment