I would estimate a couple of weeks work here. I think it may take six months in total to work on Cornwall. Although I began last year at the end of July I have done almost nothing for six months whilst my back was recovering. As I work on each county I am looking at everything that is available to me from the earliest records up to the latest census (and Free BMD although I do not record any births or marriages for living people in a public way). I tend to stick with the Canadian standard of 100 years for births, 75 years for marriages and 20 years for deaths.
Gradually I am building the trees that I find at Bodmin/St Breock and will continue with these parishes. Then I will move back to Landrake and environs to make sure I have extracted everything from this area into my trees. From there I will select on the basis of numbers of Blake entries in the baptisms/marriages/burials and then collect around these centres.
Do I see a pattern yet in how I will publish these interesting trees? No not yet but the Blake family in Cornwall is there from the beginning of the parish registers. Are they a unique founder in the British Isles? That is really the rationale for this exercise to prove that there were a number of ancient founding lines of Blake in the British Isles that are unconnected. That these lines are descendant of both immigrant Blake lines as exposed in the Britian's Immigrant Database lately published and of ancient lines in the British Isles that took on the Blake surname. Why they took on the Blake surname is an interesting query that especially catches my notice as my own line at Upper Clatford/Andover/PentonMewsey is, as a result of yDNA testing, ancient to the British Isles dating back thousands of years so they have, in the 1300s taken on the surname Blake and why did they do that? Can I find that answer for my own line and also discover the descendants of the Blake immigrants (at least 31 distinct lines) who came to England in the 1200s to 1400s.
1 comment:
I'm another descendant of the Landrake Blakes,so thanks for all your work on them. I've not read all previous posts but just wonder why you think the Blakes were immigrants around 1300.That is when people started using surnames,apart from the 'de placename' type.. I suspect that the name may be the same as Black, as spelling was very variable and vowel shifts are common. Even in the 19th cent. one of the Landrake families was entered in a census as 'Blake'.
Tony Wise
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