15th century Blake document

I requested an estimate from The National Archives (UK) which was "an answer" by Richard and William Blake in the 15th century. It has tantalized me somewhat for the past year and I finally decided to order it. There are about eight such documents in the catalogue in this time period. No place referenced and it could be London, Hampshire, Wiltshire, or East Anglia in this time period. I have ordered it so that it will be downloadable from the website (my preferred method of acquiring documents). Once I receive it I will transcribe it.

I continue to work on the Routledge documents and had completed one page of a two page item. That was about a month ago and now going back I will need to relearn the writing style as I have completely lost the recognition that led me through the first page. Again, this document does not reveal the name of the Laird of the Routledge Clan but does mention Bewcastledale as being the location for this particular John Routledge. The second page may have more and I must get back to working on that document. Then I will proceed with the remaining documents. I have moved away from Routledge somewhat and it has been a gradual process since I first collected over 2000 lines of Routledge records (baptisms, marriages, burials, etc.). I gave that file to my "cousin" Thomas Routledge (for whom I am now transcribing the documents) and he has literally run with that document and multiplied its information many times over. We, that is us Routledges not living in England, have benefitted greatly from Tom's work. He has taken us back to our Clan roots in Scotland which was only ever hinted at when I was a child that we might actually be descended from a Scottish Clan. They lived in the Liddesdale area which meant that they were constantly set upon in the 1500s.

My Blake research continues apace and I am in the process of developing the Blake-one-name-study website. The decision has to be made whether to attach it to our current family domain site or purchase a new domain. I can not really decide just at the moment (nothing to do with money at all; just the additional maintenance required if I go to a separate domain). I will make my decision by the middle of this month in that regard. Mostly I am concentrating on the Marriages of Blake members and collecting as much information as possible and that is assisted by the Marriage Challenges which are done by members of the Guild of One Name Studies who live in England. In order to thank them for all their effort I have been transcribing Blake wills and adding them to the Probate Index. I have added over 1000 entries thus far and I shall soon have another 500 to submit. But aside from the Marriage Challenges I need to clean up the file that I downloaded from Free BMD and eventually I want to combine all the counties so that I have one file. Plus I want to create some graphs on Blake marriages in particular Registration Districts over the decades beginning with the 1840s.

yDNA has become my main tool now for looking at individual Blake  and Pincombe lines. When people write to me for help I mostly suggest yDNA testing  as the best means of looking at their family. Particularly if they are descendant of American colonists. In Canada I would give a guess that most Blake families are descendant of the Irish Blake family. I know my own is very very small in the early 1900s here. Plus we did not have any relatives other than my grandfather and his brother who came to Canada with the Blake surname. A number of my grandfather's cousins did emigrate to Australia.

Gardening does get in the way somewhat. I want to keep knitting for our grandson so that too is taking up computer time. But I am slowly moving away from working on my other lines which is freeing up some time there. They interest me but only really hard digging is going to reveal any more on most of these lines. I have material and I will gradually transcribe it but each step back now is a major task first in order to do that likely.