Looking at Wiltshire Wills

I discovered yesterday that Dad's Cookies sold in Canada are actually made here.  That is good news as they are my favourite cookie.

To the best of my knowledge I have collected all the Blake Wiltshire Wills although will also check to see if there are more available from earlier but I think I have them all. All of these wills have been blogged by me and I generally put in anything that I found of interest when I blogged the will.

 Martyn/Martin/Marten (9.5 miles sw of Salisbury, 32 miles from Calne)

William Blake 1545 / Agnes Blake 1563 - Lived at Marten, Wiltshire. From the two wills their children appear to be John, Elizabeth, Agnes and Alys. Since I follow only the male line John is the one of interest.

John Blake 1582 / Elizabeth Blake 1583 - Lived at Marten, Wiltshire. John is the son of William and Agnes above and he and his wife had daughters so this line daughtered out. Marten is south of Salisbury so it is difficult to say that this is a line coming down from Calne or a line coming across from Hampshire or up from Christchurch/Southampton. But no one in the male Blake line is descendant of this couple. 

South Newton (19 miles WSW of Andover, 30 miles S of Calne).

The Blake family at South Newton continues from the 1500s  to the present. A freehold in Stoford (close to South Newton) was purchased by Henry Blake (between 1693 and 1704) and in 1704 Henry passed it to John Blake and John sold it in 1720 (British History Online). Could this be the Calne Blake family? Certainly Henry was a forename in the Blake family of Calne at the time of the destruction of the family home at Pinhills in 1643. But there were Blakes at South Newton in the 1500s.

Dental appointment interrupted my day and I am getting older as I found that I needed a long rest after that appointment. 

Last night heavy snow which we definitely need but it looks like it could be 40 cm so a fair amount but we are headed towards March when we do get our heaviest snows. 

Today more work on the Wiltshire/Hampshire/Berkshire/Dorset Blake wills. It is a number of years since I transcribed all of the Wiltshire wills and likely the same for the rest. It is good to have the blogs to review though as I put quite a bit of time into each one pulling out available data at the time. 

I am still thinking that I should write an article on the Blake yDNA for the Guild Journal in hopes of attracting more testers as finding one with a proven paper trail back to the Calne Blake family could prove interesting. I still need to find the work I did on the French yDNA. I remember doing it and not that long ago and I did find some interesting details when I did it I recall. 

The new ethnicity reports that My Heritage has created - Ethnicity Estimate v2.5: The Long-Awaited Improved DNA Ethnicity Model are now available and most interesting. There was also an Ancient Report which I did find very interesting as it located my grandfather Blake as a Western Hunter Gatherer in the British Isles very early on. Intriguing really and we do have to listen to these stories by peoples who lived in places for a very long time. Their knowledge base is huge and often so detailed as it was passed down through the families (and I do realize now in my old age that that was exactly what my grandfather was doing - passing it on because we were so far from where my Blake family lived in England).  As my brother next older to me in age and I met through the last 15 years of his life from 2007 on we met regularly (three to four times a year) in London (my home town) where we talked about our family and especially he was interested in the yDNA. It all sort of came together after my mother passed away. She had reminded me of my intense interest in DNA as a child and certainly it did drive me towards Chemistry at University. But she had also talked to him about DNA and that people were testing so the combination came together not long after she passed as we started emailing each other and then I spotted the Sorenson Genomics Testing and mentioned it and he was keen. In all Edward, my brother and I tested our DNA with Sorensen Genetics and I just started to collect all the data that came forward. At that time there were a couple of matches with Doug and other Blake descendants primarily in Australia as I recall but also in the United States. They did not carry it forward into FT DNA as that offer was suggested and I did do that with all three of our tests and then so much testing since on all of the kits. I must go in and have a look at my siblings also on My Heritage and Edward for the new ethnicity reports. It is amazing how differently we all inherited from our four grandparents - me especially as I am totally different from everyone except my brother next in age to me but younger. He and I are the most similar but he still does not match me that closely. Interesting how that happens - I simply inherited a very large percentage from my paternal grandmother and none of them did. I was around 36% ?/Rawlings and they all tend to be in the neighbourhood of 12 to 18% with all of them inheriting strongly in the Blake line. The same in the maternal line with me inheriting quite strongly in the Buller line and a number of them inherited in the Taylor line (which does have Irish matches) and then in the Pincombe they inherited far more than I did with me inheriting strongly in the Routledge/Gray side. I think it is mostly Routledge for me as my Scot percentage tends to look like it is a generation closer than actual. So always very interesting. My Heritage is growing rapidly and I still have not done the work of inserting all my new matches into my database to work on the phasing of my grandparents and great-grandparents which I liked to update every year but it is now three years since I made a big update. The reality is that it was really the DNA (and my cousin wanting the Pincombe Profile for his book) that brought me into genealogy finally in 2003. I did have the experience though through the years of helping Edward at the repositories as he searched for his family's records both in Ontario and then in the New England States. It took us simply everywhere in New England and then to Utah to the Family History Library and to the Allen Country Library in Indiana as well as the Library of Congress in Washington. I have seen so many of these repositories including of course NEHGS and NYGBS where we spent many days going through their collections. Our very first trip to the United States to discover information was in 1973 I think. We had exhausted all the information at the Ontario Archives and Library and Archives Canada by then. Then there was Kew in London, England - a fantastic resource which I occasionally toy with the idea of going and spending a bit of time there. But you can buy scanned records from them which at 79.5 years of age works very well for me.

Tea finished and the day is ahead of me.