My Heritage Site and the Blake one name study

FT DNA was offering a special 14 month membership to My Heritage for $69 (US) so decided that I would take advantage of that offer. I will try to link it to my one name Blake study page.

http://www.kipp-blake-families.ca/blakegoons/

I would like to see if it would be possible to manage a number of Blake trees on the My Heritage site. It will give me the opportunity to link up with the many Blake families who are using the site and have done their DNA.

The latest results for yDNA in the Blake study have resulted in a good deal of thinking on my part especially with regard to the origin of the Blake surname. I am not sure at this time how many trees I could put up on the site and will probably concentrate on the trees that I have in hand for the various Blake groups in the yDNA study.

I continue extracting the Blake data from the Calendar of Patent Rolls with just the last twenty six to be done and I shall go back and pick up the group that I passed over in the first set of 100. There were just so many Commissions with regards to "small incursions" by lords and their liege men that I decided to skip past them and move on to the more interesting entries but for the sake of completion I will go back and pick up those entries. Then I will build a table of occurrence and place just to see what comes out of that bit of research over a 250 year period when the Blake name was gradually moving from le Blake to Blake and it would appear that their prospects rose and fell during this period and in some cases rose again.

As mentioned earlier I am allowing my imagination full range on the surname Blake and its origins but must admit I am starting to consider that this was a name given to a group of men who served perhaps at the Norman Conquest but will certainly leave that up in the air but definitely they started their history as liege men serving a lord and the name given to them/chosen by them although that is harder to see was based on their facial/hair colouring which would appear to indicate that they were very fair skinned and blond haired. But would this also be true for every group of Blake? Well that is part of the intent of gathering all this information from the Calendar of Patent Rolls. The locations of the many named Blake individuals are from all over England.

I will be returning to my transcriptions and marriage extractions now that Christmas is coming to a close. This is the longest Christmas/New Years Season that I have experienced since childhood when it didn't really end until after Epiphany and always began with Advent I at Church. It has been a fascinatingly busy time but my accomplishments with respect to genealogy have been rather weak.

I spent yesterday working on the Rashleigh family document and it now works with respect to moving from endnote number to endnote as does the document for the lately posted Baynard family at Lackham house. We  visited Lacock on our British tour a few years ago and it was fascinating going through the article on Lackham house. Lacock is a very delightful village in Wiltshire/Somerset which takes you back in time in a very beautiful way. We enjoyed our time at Lacock and now being involved with the DigVillage project at Dunster can appreciate the work that is done by these many groups in keeping alive the stories that there are to tell in these wonderful old villages.