Probate of Blake Wills

I have had a number of requests through the years (about 2013 I started to produce an index of the probate for Blake Wills (the transcriptions of which can be found in various blogs published by me over the past 14 years) as part of my contribution to the Guild of one-name studies) for the information which is available on the Probate Index to which I have contributed. I have produced over 4000 lines of entries thus far but these entries do not contain the surnames of the testator. I am going to add in that information to my files and eventually will put the entire file up on my webpage. I will likely create a hypertext link to the particular blog where the will is mentioned.

Some of the requests have come from people who have visited my Blake profile on the Guild site. Most of them do not  actually have access to that information as one must be a member of the Guild. As I continue to wind down in terms of memberships, I am considering making this information available on my website so that any Blake researcher can access the entry plus hyperlink it back to the pertinent blog. Mind you it will take me a while to create the database making that possible but as I work my way through the wills extracting the information for the next submission I will add in all of that information and when I get bored with whatever I am doing I will go back and do the same with the 4000 plus lines already available. It will be a huge file as roughly 50% of the names have been excluded.

That would certainly decrease my emails I am noticing as I work away at filing/deleting from my In Box. When people do write I generally extract the information that they want from my excel file and then refer them to the pertinent blog post. That takes me time and it would be so much quicker just to refer them to my webpage and the link to the Probate Index.

As I am working my way through the set of wills that I have not yet indexed I am being reminded that I had put all of my wills into the database and currently I am working on King family in the Andover Hampshire area as my King family was at Upper Clatford and I can trace back to my 4x great grandfather Thomas King but no ideas on the names of his parents. He left his will in 1762 but does not indicate anyone other than his son in law Joseph Blake.  I transcribed 16 King wills in that local area so the database is actually all my wills but the majority of them are Blake.