Essex Blake marriages

Pushing on ahead with the Civil Registration Marriages for the Blake family and I am now into Essex and approximately half way through. The bulk of these marriages are from the 1930s on although there are still a substantial number of marriages prior to this time period.The Essex Blake family is another rather interesting one that I have had several requests concerning their origin. Again the best method to place your Blake family is to do a yDNA test. It is expected that there will be a number of ancient Blake lines in the British Isles. Why this surname became so popular is a mystery. The surname itself can be traced back to the late 1100s and presumably when surnames were adapted a number of families chose to use the surname Blake since we have quite a variety of yDNA signatures for this family name.

As one of the co-administrators I deal with the project without prejudice. I have no ideas on "founding" lines of the Blake family. Some of the haplogroups are indeed ancient to the British Isles but one can not say with any definite conclusion that any of them are the Blake family found in the mediaeval documents. The query remains about the Blake family at Andover with their mention in the Blake Pedigree Chart held at the Swindon and Wiltshire Record Office with regard to their connection back to the ancient Blake family at Blakelands which is first mentioned in the 1286 Subsidy. I am still curious about all the Blake lines at Andover and how they were/or were not related. The mention of the Andover Blake family in a Berkshire Blake family will is intriguing and still remains unanswered as to whether there was a relationship between these families. The advantage to the yDNA studies is it makes the linking back easier especially if enough people test.

The Blake family worldwide is huge and I have hopes that our FT DNA Blake yDNA study will grow exponentially so that we all learn a great deal about the heritage of our family name.

Today I started on one of my projects which is to gather all the Blake marriages into a single excel file and then produce charts by decade on the number of Blake marriages and graphically to show the spread of Blake families from the 1840s to the mid 1900s. World War I and World War II had an enormous influence on the movement of people in the UK.