Dr Joe Flood spoke recently at a BIFHSGO special event. He was discussing his COAD one-name study and the DNA of Cornwall. We have been corresponding occasionally over the last six or seven years as he has a Pincombe in his study because a great grandmother COAD married a PINCOMBE back in the early 1800s but decided, after separation, to change her name back to COAD and that resulted in a COAD descendant (who was actually a PINCOMBE) submitting his results to the COAD study. Joe wrote to me to tell me that he thought this person was a Pincombe descendant so I said to let him know he was welcomed to join the project and we would try to sort it out. As luck would have it he is a match to my branch of the PINCOMBE family. However, his line was at Barnstaple and I still do not know the line prior to the 1700s. My 10x great grandfather William Pincombe/Pyncombe/Pencombe was married to Emotte Snow and they had 9 children with seven of them being male. I do know the descent of two of these sons. I also know that one died young and there is a possibility that the youngest son went to Scandinavia and founded a line there that matches my line's yDNA. But that does leave three sons for whom I have, at this time, no clear information on where they lived in north west Devon. William's father Thomas was the second eldest and remained at North Molton whilst his elder brother went to South Molton and the family there became more established in terms of having a crest and marrying into more upper crust families. My own line continued at North Molton, Filleigh and East Buckland. With William's son Richard moving to Bishops Nympton at some point and the line at Bishops Nympton is descendant of him. His two marriages yielded five children (2 sons) and the Pincombe family at Bishops Nympton is mostly descendant of William (son of his first wife). But I didn't attend the talk to hear about Pincombe; it was his other topic the DNA of Cornwall that interests me. There is a large BLAKE family in Cornwall from the 1520s on that I have tracked in Cornwall but I have never been able to persuade any BLAKE member to test there. I believe them to be descendant of a Breton BLAKE family coming to Cornwall in the 1500s and the largest portion of the BLAKE population descends from this BLAKE ancestor but there was also a spillover from the BLAKE family of Devon into Cornwall and I have blog posts showing this process. But again I do not have anyone who has tested from the BLAKE family of Devon either and word of mouth claims that they are descendant of the BLAKE family of Andover - my line! It would be interesting to see if that is true. Although I am not trusting of word of mouth without some evidence, it is an interesting idea especially given that there are just a few areas that have a similar ancient yDNA haplogroup that is in my BLAKE line. The I2 study has several people who trace back to the 1400s/1500s in southern England and to quote my grandfather his line was in the Andover forever. I note that this line is now labelled the Aboriginal line in the British Isles by some.
I did want to plant that little thought in Joe's head about finding a Cornwall BLAKE as it has come to my thoughts lately that that may be a way to encourage more British Isles BLAKE family members to test. Excellent talk and well attended and it was of course online. Online is the greatest gift of COVID if there can be any gift that has to be it.
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