One of the projects for the Blake one name study is the location of Blake families in England by decade beginning with 1840s decade and ending with 1940s decade. I have extracted all the Blake marriages from Free BMD and I am slowly putting them into a form that I can use them to produce my charts and eventually maps of England. For the moment I have not touched Wales or Scotland. I will do that at a later date though. Eventually I will also continue this backwards into the early 1800s and 1700s and on back into the 1600s and even 1500s with the Parish Registers. Another ongoing project is extraction of Blake entries from the Norfolk Parish Registers which are online at the Family History Site. This will allow me to move forward with the Blake family there. Another researcher has researched the Blake family in Suffolk and I must be in contact with her again now that we have taken on the Blake one name study.
In total there are 30,993 records on Free BMD for marriages in England, Scotland and Wales between 1837 and 1956 although the last decade (1950s) is only just now coming in. Once I have completed all the counties of England then I will be able to determine the number of Blake marriages in the English Counties as they were in 1840. One of the problems with such a study is small changes that occurred over time in the record keeping in areas that overlap in more than one county and parishes that end up being counted in a separate county for historical reasons. However, the overall view will be an interesting one.
As the yDNA study develops with Barrie Blake and Bill Bleak, there are a few interesting Blake lines emerging and certainly they do not share common ancestry in thousands and thousands of years being from different haplogroups. I am working both forward and backwards in time with Blake families. One of my forward studies is the Blake family at Andover and I am looking at the descendants of Nicholas and Robert Blake (and their sister Elizabeth who married (unknown) Mylne). Their father is thus far unknown to me although other researchers claim him to be William Blake a son of one of the descendants of the Blake family of Calne Wiltshire - there is some discrepancy in just which son he is (several different researchers attach this family at different points in the Blake family there). I still need to prove the yDNA line at Andover but I am hopeful that that will happen in the near future as more and more people become interested in testing their yDNA and in particular Blake descendants.
Once I have completed my survey of the decades I will put it up on the Guild of one One Name Studies website for the Blake study:
http://www.one-name.org/profiles/blake.html
The maps I will likely place on this blog although time will tell on that. This is a long term project as I am only about 1/3 of the way through the Blake marriages at this point. A county file generally take me several hours to organize if it is around 400 Blake marriages and some of these counties have 1000 marriages and even as high as 5000. I would like to complete all the counties before putting the information together but if I find that something interesting is emerging I will relate that on this blog.
As mentioned I am returning once again to the Blake family after my hiatus with my Pincombe family. I will still continue transcribing the Pincombe wills but the focus of my research now will be Blake primarily. Once North Molton parish registers (what I own in fiche anyway) are complete then I will return to Abbotts Ann. The darkening evening is an open invitation to sit at the fiche reader by the hour.
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