600 plus emails

In case anyone has been writing to me the last six months whilst I have been somewhat out of action, I will get to your email but I have over 600 emails in my inbox. It is a slow process working my way through all of them and apologies for the delay.

I should say though that I do not have material on the Blake family in Ireland other than the books of Martin Blake published in the early part of the 1900s. These books are an excellent source looking at the Galway Blake family which is really quite huge in Ireland (the best way to determine if you are descendant of the Galway Blake family (at least two particular lines) is to do your yDNA. That at least gets you into the ballpark and from there, as the project grows, we hope to be able to come up with interesting results for the many Blake founder lines. I hope to get into the Irish Blake records but I am still beavering away in the counties of England and at the moment looking solely at the Blake family of Cornwall. It is an isolated county and hence much easier for me to look at. I would love to do Hampshire/Wiltshire/Somerset but it is an enormous task and will have to be done in sections as I now believe that there are a number of founder lines (including my own) and some of them are ancient to the British Isles like my I2a1b1a3 and have acquired the surname perhaps through marriage or as a characteristic surname which it is. However, Blake seems to be well established as a surname by the late 1200s/early 1300s so I suspect that adoption of it as a characteristic surname may not have occurred after this time period.

Although I have returned to research once again catching up on six months worth of emails is going to be a rather long task and do write me again as I am tending to respond to my daily emails on a regular basis picking up on the older ones as time permits. It is amazing to think I am retired as I am a rather busy retired person.

This hobby of genealogy has rather taken over my life which is surprising in itself as I was never into genealogy prior to my sudden entry into it. My cousin George DeKay can probably take most of that credit as he wanted me to write a profile of my Pincombe family for the Westminster/Delaware History Book and requested that of me in 2003. That along with the trip to London, UK in 2001 which kindled my interest in the whole idea of actually doing genalogy (although it did take a couple of years and I did fight the thought initially!). I belonged to the camp that said I already know everything about my family and in truth I did know quite a bit as what I had been told as a child matched what I found. What was missing were the details before my great grandparents in many cases completely lost to my parents and grandparents although my grandfather certainly knew his family history very well and what he remembered proved to be absolutely correct and substantiated by records. The same was true of my mother's memories of her families although she did not know all of them but what she did know was quite accurate.