Blake family of Somerset, Dorset and Devon

I have been entering all the information on the website for Admiral Blake :

http://www.portbury-hundred.co.uk/admiralreport.htm

into a Legacy File. There are difficulties with some of the connections which I have managed to correct but I need to find proper citations so will not publish the descendants of Humphrey Blake until I have verified all that material. However, I will add some of the interesting links that have become apparent from the wills I have just completed in Dorset.

It is great to see people working on the Blake family but the author of this webpage does mention that she has used printed material for parts of her work knowing that there was some doubt to their accuracy. I wish that people would only publish what they know to be accurate! Her particular website has been quoted a number of times on public trees on Ancestry and with only her website as a source.

My aim in looking at her material was to see if the bulk of it was useful to Blake researchers. I think that a cursory glance at it if you descend from Somerset lines does give you some information on the descendants of Humphrey Blake who died and was buried at Over Stowey, Somerset. It can be somewhat helpful but I would check every link for yourself. Since I still have the Somerset wills to do I will only relate the relationships between Malachi Blake of Blandford Forum, William Blake of Crewkerne and their mutual ancestor Humphrey Blake of Over Stowey. When I have completed the Somerset Wills then I will publish the descendants of Humphrey Blake as I believe them to be using the parish records and the wills to link the families. I will eliminate all lines coming down for which I do not have data either from Martin Southwoods excellent site for Somerset parish registers (http://www.wsom.org.uk/Parreg.html) or my own fiche of Somerset Parish Records. The Dorset Parish Records are now on Ancestry.

Spent a few hours updating the Legacy file with the Parish Registers that I posted 3 April 2012

http://kippeeb.blogspot.ca/2012/04/parish-records-in-overstowey-somerset.html

and that file now has a number of items marked in red which I have not yet placed. I can see that I should perhaps do the Somerset wills out of order as there are fifty seven of them plus the short abstracts of wills that are now missing since the WWII bombing of the Exeter Record Office. I believe I shall leave Durham wills for the moment (Sir Francis Blake) and proceed to work on the Somerset Wills.

I am part of a panel at the BIFHSGO Conference next week here thankfully so will spend some time this week looking at that just to be sure I am ready. I will be talking about my Blake one name Study and the value of the Guild of one name studies in my research.

I will wait until I have done the Somerset wills and updated the parish record references in the Legacy File from the website for Admiral Blake before publishing the connections between the different Blake families in Dorset, Somerset and it appears I have found a North Devon connection as well.