Blake one name study

Today I shall register the Blake one name study at the Guild of one name studies. It is an enormous project but a good deal of work has already been done by my two co-members of the Blake Study. The webpages are very well done by Barrie Blake in Australia. He is descendant of the Norfolk Blake family.

I have collected about half of the marriages for Blake now in England between 1837 and the 1940s from FreeBMD - a somewhat daunting task but once I have them all in Excel then I can add the partners where I can find them and it will give me a starting point to then look at the census. I have to decide how to manage all of these different Blake family lines as there will be thousands of them in the 1800s. That will be my work for a while although eventually I will hope to tie them back to the Blake families of the 1700s. I can do this in Hampshire not too badly once I get started using the census I suspect but time will tell. The same is probably also true of Somerset and Wiltshire, I will have Barrie's help with the Norfolk family and one of the Guild members has researched her Suffolk line extensively. The London group are descendant of the Hampshire Blake family but there will be others there as well. The Kent and Surrey Blake families may also be descendant of the Hampshire Blake and we will work on that. I have all of these extractions from FreeBMD in Excel and have now managed to put all the marriages for Hampshire into year and quarter with their own columns - it is a major task just doing that. However, it will let me now put in the partner where it is obvious and for the remainder I will need to go to the census and try to determine the name of the spouse.

My first article for the newsletter in April will be an article on deep ancestry of the Blake lines thus far that are part of the Blake project at FT DNA. I will also do a second article on published books and articles on the Blake family. I have quite a bit of information on that but it will require some more pulling of information.

I continue with the Upper Clatford Parish Register. Again the priest in the 1770s has rewritten a Parish Register in this case Parish Register 2 and placed it at the front of Parish Register 3. It is handy and I have proofread all the marriages. The changes were minimal actually but much more legible. I am now working on the baptisms. Then the end of Parish Register 3 takes us from 1776 to 1812. Parish Register 2 had taken us up to 1776 in Baptisms and Burials with the marriages going to the new form in 1754.