Blake Marriages on Free BMD

I continued working away on the Blake Marriages on Free BMD and have now managed to pull the spouse name back to the marriages beginning in 1928 (up to 1951). There were ~900 marriages in Hampshire in this time period and only ~500 between 1912 and 1927. Then there are ~1500 from Sep quarter 1837 to the end of 1911 in Hampshire. This is an enormous task and will take quite a while to complete the entire collection of Blake marriages on Free BMD. In my lifetime I will never be able to collect all the Blake information worldwide but I will attempt to collect as much as I am able. The frequency of the Blake name worldwide from the World Profile site:

Country    FPM
AUSTRALIA    546.24
IRELAND    519.41
UNITED KINGDOM    475.47
NEW-ZEALAND    391.15
UNITED STATES    274.12
CANADA    257.19
SPAIN    4.82
BELGIUM    4.59
SWITZERLAND    3.83
DENMARK    3.74

Since the population of the United States is about 307,000,000 and that of the United Kingdom is about 62,000,000 (about 5 times larger) then the largest number of Blake surnames can be found in the United States. The ethnic origin of the Blake surnames includes England, Scotland, Ireland (Eire and Northern) and Wales. I have a number of books published by different branches of the Blake family although primarily those descended from the Massachusetts and the Carolinas colonies. Unfortunately most of these books are following the erroneous book first published by Horatio Somerby where he took Nicholas Blake (died Old House, Enham near Andover, Hampshire, England in 1547) and invented a brother Humphrey (who subsequently became the head of the Somerset Blake family) and completely ignored the will of the mother of Nicholas (and his brother Robert). He then attached Nicholas directly to the Blake family at Calne through William a supposed son of Robert Blake and Avis Wallop. Eliminating this error is going to be a major job although recently NEHGS has published three papers discussing the errors made. More on this discussion later as I start to collect US Blake information and organize it.

I continue proofreading the Upper Clatford Parish Registers and as soon as they are complete I will submit them to the OPC Hampshire website but will also post them on my webpages. The files are in excel and being all text fairly small. Posting Andover will be somewhat of a challenge as it is quite a large file but I haven't even started to proofread it yet and at least the first 100 years needs to be done before I release it. The Registers become easier to read after that time period.