Blake family

I wrote to the owner of one of the Blake trees on My heritage mostly because it shows descent from my 3x great grandparents Thomas Blake and Sarah (Coleman) Blake. I have a pretty extensive tree coming down from the parents of Thomas Blake (Joseph Blake and Joanna (King) Blake) which pretty much includes everyone known to me from discussions by my Grandfather Blake who lived with us when I was a child. However, I was only eight when he died so have always been open to other thoughts. A researcher in England put together a similar tree for a descendant who lives in Australia and he shared that with me about fifteen years ago now.

For the most part this family (looking at the fiche for the area parishes) lived at Upper Clatford from the marriage of Joseph Blake (from Andover) and Joanna King in 1757. This family continues to live at Upper Clatford (a few descendants). They also did live in neighbouring villages like Abbotts Ann, Monxton, Longparish, Little Ann, etc etc but mostly in that area around Andover.

This new tree has its main roots in Havant which is far to the south of Hampshire. I have worked on the Havant Blake family when I did the wills for Hampshire. I have no real ideas on their location before they are located there. It is unlikely that this line is descendant of Thomas Blake and Sarah (Coleman) Blake simply because all of their children and their descendants are accounted for in the research done by an earlier researcher in England (name escapes me at the moment but do have that in an email from the early 2000s) and myself.

The question really is how to proceed. Neither I nor any of my siblings match the ten descendants of the Blake Havant family who would be third cousins or third cousins once or twice or three times removed (I have long generations in my family due to my ancestor being a younger child (born in 1845) with much older siblings (born in the late 1820s and 1830s). This researcher has mentioned that they are not sure of that connection. Should I proceed and say that this connection is unlikely? or just leave them to realize that it is very unlikely? Always a quandry.

I actually have a similar problem much further back in my Blake tree. The parents of Joseph were Thomas Blake and Ann (Carter) Blake and he was the son of Thomas Blake and Mary (Spring) Blake. Thomas was their only child as far as I can tell and I do have the fiche for the areas around Andover. A Charles Blake was baptized at Abbotts Ann possibly in the exact same time period (I can not find that in the Abbotts Ann fiche and do suspect he was baptized elsewhere and the son of a different Blake line). I have given all that information to one of the individuals who kept attaching to my Family Search tree but this likely error is widely circulated and I encountered it again in the One World Tree. I am hoping that DNA may solve this mystery. I do not know for sure that the Blake line that I believe Charles descends from is the same as my Blake line. Finding a male to test his yDNA in that line would be really handy but it has not yet happened.

Since I help to manage the yDNA study for Blake at FT DNA I do have access to lots of Blake lines but my own line remains obscure primarily because of only children in the line for three generations and then my father was an only child a number of generations later. We do have autosomal matches with descendants of Thomas Blake and Sarah (Coleman) Blake which proves the line back to Thomas but as of yet no male Blake yDNA for this Upper Clatford/Andover family other than my brothers.

I thought I would write this blog post to see if anything came from my putting down in writing what I have been thinking. Again this line on My Heritage is not a male Blake line so no possibility of testing. The Blake ancestry is back several generations.

I think I will do what I usually do simply make people aware of all the information already available on the Blake line at Upper Clatford.