Bodmin and St Breock, Cornwall Marriages

Working on the St Breock marriages and there are 54 with a male Blake and 61 with a female Blake from the beginning of the registers in the 1500s to the late 1800s/early 1900s. There were 49 male Blake marriages at Bodmin and 42 female Blake marriages at Bodmin. As I work through all of these marriages I will eventually plot them on a map of Cornwall just to see if anything interesting emerges from such charting. St Breock and Bodmin are just seven miles apart and my grandfather used to walk to Kimpton to visit with my grandmother before they were married and that was 5 miles so it is rather reasonable that these two places would be well known by people living in these villages.

Would all of these families be descendant of John Blake from Breton coming to Bodmin earlier in the 1500s? Would a number of people have chosen the surname Blake just because of their fair colouring? On the reverse of that would a number of people have chosen the surname Blake for their swarthy colouring?

Blake appears to be a surname that was occurring around England by the end of the 1200s and with a lot of particular areas in England by the 1300s and 1400s. With the parish registers we are into the middle to latter part of the 1500s so would people have just spontaneously chosen Blake as their surname or are all of these individuals descendant of particular Blake lines from the continent?

My own line in Hampshire is sitting there in the mid 1400s with earlier Blake members in the Andover area back into the early 1300s but linking these requires a look at the Manor Records hopefully that will be true.

But the yDNA of my Blake line is pointing to an ancient line in the British Isles so at some point my line took on the surname Blake presumably and why did they do that? Along with being interested in the surname Blake I have acquired a rather strong interest in uncovering this mystery in my line back in the 1300s. Finding an Irish Blake at Salisbury is rather interesting and his forename Richard most interesting given that Robert Blake born circa mid 1400s has a son Richard and the Richard Blake from Ireland is found at Salisbury 7 Sep 1441 on the England's Immigrants database blogged earlier: http://kippeeb.blogspot.ca/2015/02/englands-immigrants-database-1330-1550.html

Not sure how long it will take me to work through these parish register records on the OPC Cornwall database as I have 124 parishes with baptisms, 159 parishes with marriages, 140 parishes with burials, banns in 46 parishes and non comformist baptisms in 32 parishes. I am now working on about the 12th in each of these columns (baptisms, marriages and burials).

I also want to continue working on the wills hoping to do 3 to 4 per week and still writing my 52 ancestor challenge every Monday. There are probably not enough hours in the day to do everything that I would like to do! However, will just beaver away at it all and see what happens.