Newsletter to come

Commencing on the Blake Newsletter today and should publish by the end of March or early April. I will talk about the Blake family in Cornwall and my progress there with charting the families. I will also talk about the new England's Immigrant Database 1330-1550 - a fascinating new tool to work on the Blake Family. A third topic will be the family of Theophilus Blake with the work submitted by Susan Osbourne and thank you very much to her for that material. A fourth topic will be the extraction of information from Martin Blake's books on the Blake family of Galway.  Likely I will also mention the Blake yDNA study which continues, in my mind and that of the other administrators, another fascinating way to look at the Blake families of the British Isles. The Blake family is an ancient family in the British Isles and their surname can be found in early records dating back into the 1200s. It was an illusion to think that all of the Blakes were descended from one Blake and the records are proving that this thought was quite incorrect and that Blake has a number of origins both within the British Isles and from Continental Europe. The more people who test their yDNA the greater the opportunity to take these lines back to these early founder lines.

Since my my paternal line (Blake) belongs to an ancient haplogroup of the British Isles named Deer Hunters by BritainsDNA and I2a-IslesB4 by Ken Nordvedt, the surname Blake is likely an acquired one at some point distant in the past thus far prior to the mid 1400s. This haplogroup to which my paternal line belongs is designated as I-L161/L1498 at the  FT DNA I2a project. Other members of this small subset do not have the surname Blake but do trace back to ancient lines in southern England (Devon and Cornwall) with  my line being in the Andover, Hampshire area back to the mid 1400s thus far in my tracing. BritainsDNA has provided further information naming this particular haplogroup subclade as being commonest in the South to Southwest of Ireland at around 2-3% of their database and around 2% in Southwest England (including Hampshire). This particular haplogroup is also found in the Balkans giving one the thought that my ancient ancestor left the Ice Refuge in the Balkans after the last Ice Age and headed for the extremes of the land area as the ice fields retreated north and hence found themselves in Ireland and a path back towards England (although none in Wales) and Doggerland where they possibly made their way into the now British Isles. For myself, the ancient history of my peoples most fascinates me as both my maternal and paternal DNA lines are ancient to the British Isles. My autosomal results also predict a large British Isles ancestry but also some Northern European and Scandinavian (those two being the smaller components of the ethnic heritage that is shown at AncestryDNA, BritainsDNA, FT DNA and the Genographic Project). I am considering doing the entire genome of one of my brothers and will save up my pennies but now nickles for that endeavour as our penny has now gone extinct!