Sunday today and the service is in London. I shall attend in a bit. It is called Racial Justice Sunday. I believe that everyone under the sun is equal and I thank my mother for making me realize this as a young child when I asked her about the first Black person I ever saw when I was eight years old on the bus going to the Dentist with her. I asked if he had been burned and that was why his skin was black. She said no that people came in many different shades of skin colour and we were all the same. It was so simply put that it remained with me through my childhood and until now at nearly 80 years of age. I treat all people the same (and some might say it is pretty blunt but I do not want to waste their time or mine). I am simply not a really friendly person just me.
Yesterday was a busy day looking at various items but particularly the yDNA of the I-M253 group. First and foremost these individuals are not related in the past 1000 years closely although they share the same line back from I-L22 to I-M253 so thinking they are all from Normandy might be realistic but as their evolution continued forward they took different paths.
Why did so many people have the surname Blake one might ask in the areas I am looking at - namely Hampshire/Dorset/Wiltshire/Berkshire? Well as demonstrated the wills in the Wiltshire area in the 1500s showed individuals with the Blake surname in Calne, Martin/Marten, Warminster, West Lavington, Playtford, South Newton, Erlestoke, Deverill Longbridge. Looking at Hampshire in the 1500s there were individuals with the surname Blake in Andover, Kings Somborne, Quarley, Knights Enham, Dibden, Lockerley, Penton Mewsey, West Tytherley, East Tytherley, Lymington, Winchester, Christchurch, Ellingham, Mottisfont, Romsey, Boldre, Sparsholt, Isle of Wight (Godshill, Brading). Berkshire in the 1500s there were individuals with the surname Blake in Speen, Didcot, Bucklebury.
Just in those four counties there are many Blake families in the 1500s. Getting back into the 1300s is more difficult to look at the Blake families and where they were. The land records seem helpful but I find few records prior to 1200, not many in the 1200s but more in the 1300s. The map I put up showing locations of Blake in the Calendar of Patent Rolls which included the 1300s was interesting.
The frequency of Blake in the areas mentioned Wiltshire, Berkshire, Hampshire and Dorset rather match the frequency of the wills in the 1500s. So is the family lore wrong or it was just that the Blake family at Calne was the best known of all the Blake families in these areas and if your history (which was likely to individual families) included Normandy as being your family home then one might just assume that you had some sort of a relationship with the Blake family at Calne.
I decided the next step was to look at the remainder of the people in this group and add them to my chart. The other comment is that only one individual in this group names Robert de Blakeland and the original structure was set up by Barrie Blake who did correspond with many of these people and I just carried it on and fitted them in if their haplogroup fitted which was I-M253. A number have Ireland as their designated country. All but one of the testers was at I-M253 as their level of testing and the addition fits in with the rest of the group. I have really learned all that I can given that the number of Blake testers continues to be too small to really make a point with this data other than they all descend from I-M253 which gives them a sort of ethnic origin that tends to point to Scandinavia as their location 1500 to 2500 years ago (CE). Since the history of this part of France points to a Viking settlement of Normandy between 790 and 1030 (CE) that fits with the data. The Latin documents at this time verifies this movement calling these individuals Nortmanni (men of the North). Putting all of these Blake results into one category works very well and I would not make any changes until we have considerably more Blake testers. But are they all descendant of the le Blak family no and we do not have a tester with a proven line back to Richard le Blak of Rouen, Normandy but I did find some interesting French results in another site. Must find that and republish it here as it was interesting.
Time for breakfast, yoga first.
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