Blake family of Upper Clatford/Andover/Penton Mewsey

With the testing now complete at BritainsDNA, I can now begin to forge ahead with my own Blake line as I work away at the Blake wills at PCC and County Record Offices. My own line has sat on the sidelines for a bit as I have no matches for the yDNA signature on the major databases (only on the Blood of the Isles database). Since I know that my line in Canada yDNA signature wise is only my brothers, I knew that finding more about that line had to come out of studies being done in the British Isles. I needed to have a comparison of my line with the databases that had been established in the Peoples of the British Isles study in particular.

My own line looked ancient to the British Isles as observed by several knowledgeable genetic genealogists who were looking carefully at the I haplogroup. But having this verified by BritainsDNA and labelling my line as pre-historic Britain is very helpful to learning more about my line.

In particular at what point in the past did the acquire the surname Blake? I know they carried it from the late 1400s on as a direct family line but at what point had they done so was a question in my mind. The why of doing so is probably going to be straightforward. My suspicion is that they married into the Blake family and simply took on their surname for whatever reason. At Andover they were referred to as Mr. [forename] Blake in the earliest registers although this disappeared in the latter part of the 1600s. The wills indicate that they did own some freehold property (Andover, Eastontown, Knights Enham and Penton Mewsey) and tended to be on the land initially but my ancestor became a draper in Andover (perhaps because he was the youngest son of five).

I now want to continue working on the Parish Registers for Abbots Ann and did finish a couple more pages yesterday but still only in the mid 1600s. My need to look at this parish in the early years is because the Blake family was there in the 1700s on and I want to determine if they had been there prior to that time.

Out of all this work on the Hampshire Parish Registers in this area I hope to discover the distinct Blake lines that lived in the area.