Blake Newsletter
yDNA Blake Study
HeritageDNA (a UK company that purchased Ethnoancestry) offered a special price to Ethnoancestry customers so I purchased their Chromo2 and autosomal testing for my brother’s sample. I was hoping that it would be available to talk about in this newsletter but will have to wait for another one. It should be interesting to see what comes from that testing.
There is an I2b study at FT DNA that members of that haplogroup could join if they are interested and the join link is here:
https://my.familytreedna.com/group-join.aspx?act=groupjoin&group=I2b1&vGroup=m223-y-clan
I haven’t particularly pushed joining other sites primarily because I am busy with wills at the moment and not really thinking a lot about yDNA other than how to encourage more Blake descendants to test. Bill Bleak (administrator of the Blake yDNA study) and I have been talking about offering ten free 12 marker tests to people who submit a five generation ancestry chart. However, we do not want to get all the same line so it is difficult to decide how to do that. But as always, the best chance of learning about your Blake line is by testing your yDNA. If you match one of the groups in the test then you have a good idea on your line’s “resting spot” in some cases but not all yet.
The intention of the I2b study at FT DNA is to pinpoint locations for particular groups of alleles. Thus far it has not been successful but as the study grows the possibility increases. I have belonged to the I2a study for several years and probably knowing my origin is helpful to the people who are closeby although I noticed in looking at the I1b that most of the groups had members from Northern Europe, British Isles and Scandinavia.
Wills
I continue transcribing Wills and perhaps the next newsletter will be devoted to some of the interesting relationships that I have found. The set of wills that I am doing at the moment are for the Galway Blake family living in Somerset. A surprise as I did not realize that they were there in the early part of the 1800s. I am also trying to sort out the Blake family in Minehead and this has proven to be a formidable task. As I transcribe all the wills for this group there may be a few answers.
Legacy
Recently I gave a talk on the Blake one name study at a Conference and in preparing for the talk I realized that I could see my legacy to the Blake study quite clearly. Ultimately, I plan to transcribe all the Blake wills that I can locate and thus far I have nearly 2000 Blake wills. Once completed I intend to put them into an *.pdf file and upload them to Archive.org. Only the transcription and discussion will be uploaded as there is and will be crown copyright on the will images for ever.
A second part of my legacy will be the marriages from 1837 to 1911 – 30,000 – of them in England itself and I hope to have a goodly number of them with spousal and other information. The mediaeval database on the Blake one name study website will be enhanced as time passes. Unfortunately the website is down at the moment due to transfer to a new internet provider. I hope to have it up by the end of October.
Next Issue
I am always looking for new information to put into the newsletter and welcome submissions from Blakes around the world. Submit to my email address:
kippeeb@rogers.com
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