Blake Newsletter completed

The Blake Newsletter is completed and very early actually. I discussed Humphrey Blake whose will was probated in 1625/6 and his connection back in time to another Humphrey Blake whose will was probated in 1558. The next issue will look at that Humphrey Blake and his possible parents but will involve some time at the Family History Centre to look at the subsidies. So many have talked about the parents of this Humphrey Blake but I am not sure if the subsidies have been searched for possible clues and so I will make that my task for the next issue in October. This will be Issue 3 of Volume 11 of the Blake Newsletter. 

Back when I started the Newsletter I had no idea how long I would be writing it but the years have passed and lots of travel to Europe with time spent at Kew which has helped me to look at the Blake family in perhaps a different way. The desire to have one founding line appears to have been strong at some point in the past but with the release of the Emigrants' Database 1330 - 1550 it was obvious that Blake had been on the continent for a while as different holders of this family surname came to England as emigrants from the Continent between 1330 and 1550. 

The first records for Blake were surprisingly, for me at least, not until the 1200s although that doesn't preclude them being in the British Isles earlier. For some well known Blake lines, their original surname had not been Blake at all but rather Caddell like the Galway Blake line. For other Blake lines like some of the Blake families in Cornwall their ancestor was a Breton who came so very early on to Cornwall and can be seen in the records. For the Calne Blake family their ancestor looks like Richard le Blak who came from Rouen, Normandy in the 1270s to set up a wool market and appears to have stayed first in Berkshire and later found in Wiltshire. For my own Blake line at Andover I have no idea yet why they took on the surname Blake but the records there go back to the early 1300s so I am suspicious that a marriage between my line and a Blake female resulted in the acquisition of the surname but that remains a thought only as no proof has been found to date. For the Blake family in East Anglia I am suspicious that this was again an emigrant from possibly Denmark/The Netherlands who came to work at the King's Court in London and received land in Norfolk for his service. So not a single name holder and that shows in the yDNA Blake Study at FT DNA - many founders.