Blake Newsletter - Volume 3, Issue 3, 2014

Also located at : http://blog.kipp-blake-families.ca/?page_id=2  in *.pdf format with all earlier issues of the Blake Newsletter.

Blake Newsletter Volume 3, Issue 3, 2014

Blake YDNA Study
Susan Osborne and Linda Hurtubise have kindly consented to become co-administrators of the Blake yDNA project at FT DNA. Susan Osborne will be managing the project for the descendants of Theophilus Blake and Linda Hurtubise will manage the project for the Blake family in East Anglia (Norfolk) possibly descendant of Thomas Blake at Swaffham Market. Bill Bleak will continue managing the I1 haplogroup Blake study. Michael Blake is to be especially thanked for all his work on the Galway –Towerhill and Killolla branch of the Blake family and I hope he will join us as a co-administrator as well. I will continue managing the rest of the projects but will always be watching for individuals who might be willing to take on their own surname project within the Blake Project. The intent of our project is to expand it and we are now at 78 members although not all have samples for yDNA included. 

Although autosomal DNA is attracting the most attention, yDNA surname studies are still very busy and continuing to grow. These studies provide us with the ability to match others with a common ancestor and to look at our deep ancestry as a particular haplogroup subclade.

Wills
I continue with the Wills project and have managed to transcribe and blog on a goodly number this past three months in spite of a month away in France. The intent of the Wills project is to build family trees. I have been musing in my blog about the legacy I wish to leave to my Blake-one-name-study and the final decision on my part was to begin to transcribe only three weeks out of a month and the remaining time would be spent working on family tree reconstruction based on wills, census and parish registers amongst other less well known tools.

France and the le Blak family
While I was in France, I was able to be in Rouen (part of the tour) and spent a little time in Rouen Cathedral. Richard le Blak was very much in my mind as I toured the old Cathedral with its ancient memorials. I did not see anything for this le Blak family but as the parish registers for France come online we may be lucky to find more information on this ancient family. One member Richard le Blak applied to go to market in England in 1274 as a merchant from Rouen.

Gloucestershire Blake family
Working on the wills for Gloucestershire revealed one Blake line likely descendant of the Calne Blake line. I am hoping that the more recent wills that I am working on will link back to these earlier wills in Gloucestershire.

Family Reconstruction
The intent of a one name study is to collect all instances of a surname worldwide. For large studies this is more of a dream than a reality but I have come to the conclusion that continuing to collect in an abstract way does not entirely fulfill my thoughts on how this Blake-one-name-study should flow. Hence I intend on the last Saturday of each month to produce at least one family tree that results from the collection of wills, census and parish registers, etc from material that I have managed to collect for individual family lines. I hope to begin at the end of this July.

Elizabeth Kipp née Blake  kippeeb@rogers.com

Website: http://www.kipp-blake-families.ca/elizabethmain.htm
Blog: http://kippeeb.blogspot.ca /