The yDNA project for Blake at FT DNA

Good news once again. Three more hostages have been released in Gaza and returned home to Israel but their condition does not look good; they have been underground and treated very poorly for a year and a half. Compare it to the cheerful well fed look of the 183 Palestinians that were released. This treatment has been criminal towards these hostages - the honour of the world is at stake to even permit for one moment Hamas to get away with any of this. They must be punished for their crimes against humanity. 

The yDNA Project for Blake at FT DNA has been in place for quite a long time; I am not exactly sure when Bill Bleak first set it up but I joined my brother's results sometime in 2008 I think but did not take a lot of interest in it. I felt that Blake was just too huge a project to even look at it for a few more years. Then a Siderfin cousin of mine living in England wanted to take over my one-name study at the Guild and I gave it to him along with everything that I collected. I really must remember to upload the revised book (with my corrections) and the Charting Book for Siderfin to the Guild Library and the other two places to which I submitted it. But I digress; when I gave up the Siderfin study I began to look more seriously at the Blake study and contemplate, now that I had completed my training in genealogical studies whether I could, at such a long distance away from the record base, even consider doing a one name study. In 2011 I made up my mind and applied to do the one name Blake study at the Guild. There had been another Blake descendant who had had the study at the Guild for quite a while I think but he had stepped away from it at some point not sure when. I met him later when he gave a lecture to BIFHSGO a few years back and we chatted a moment and he asked my descent and I mentioned that I had managed to get back to Robert Blake who left his will in 1521 (in latin but I had transcribed it and I need still to go back and clean up that transcription) . Since my family never left the Andover area until the latter part of the 1800s when the eldest son of Edward Blake, John, went to Eastleigh to work on the railway. He was joined by my grandfather Samuel George Blake in the late 1890s when he completed his training as a blacksmith. The line at Upper Clatford was well known to me and back to Andover with Joseph Blake son of Thomas Blake. Muddled in my mind was the line going back further with a number of forenames including William several times and then Nicholas. Nicholas stood out in the conversations with my grandfather (he did die when I was just eight) quite strongly and it wasn't until I came into the Blake one-name study that I realized over a period of time why Nicholas was a subject of discussion three hundred plus years after he left his will stating that he was from Old Hall, Enham and naming his siblings and children of course plus his wife. The main thing that I knew about Nicholas was that books had been written in the United States that had an incorrect line for the Andover Blake family going back from Nicholas. He was unaware of the Blake Pedigree Chart that had been created by the College of Arms or the Blake Family Chart held at the Bridgwater Museum in Somerset. But likely people had started to come from America to Andover looking for their roots as that was a popular thing in the latter part of the 1800s. So there I was signing my brother's results into the Blake study where there initially were no matches; not even close. Barrie Blake, Australia, did an excellent job of arranging the various sets of data into "family" groupings and I have not really altered that very much other than changing the titles to fit the results as they have developed since he created the original structure. 

Fast forward to 2014 when we went to France for a three week trip which included Rouen. There touring the Cathedral in Rouen I noted that a Richard le Blak had lived in Rouen although finding much information has been very difficult. But I was involved in extracting Blake entries from the Calendar of Patent Rolls which the University of Iowa had put online for a period for a study they were doing. I downloaded every Blake item including various spellings and I had discovered a Richard le Blak requesting and receiving permission to set up a market in England in 1274. During this month I have assigned to the le Blak family, I want to look at the feasibility of this family being the progenitor of the Calne Blake family. From a view point of who they were; it is certainly a logical thought since the Normans conquered England in 1066. By 1274 they were much in control of everything although the British who were already on land and managing items had retained much of what they had and just changed the overlords.

There is a group of individuals who have tested their y-DNA and become members of the Blake y-DNA study whose results take them back to this particular area in France where the Vikings were known to have settled. There are not a lot of Y-700 results or perhaps not any I am not sure in this group although I need to relook at that the next issue of the Blake Newsletter. Many of them have family lore of being descendant of the Blake family of Calne. This family gradually, as shown by the wills, moved away from Calne and then abruptly moved after the destruction of their home at Pinhills near Calne where they were then located in Gloucestershire. So a varied location for descendants would not be surprising coming down from the 1300s. Several lines of Blake arrived in the United States in various places and that included from the Blake Somerset Family (I have no intention of putting together the information on the Somerset Blake family in my book). Thus far I can find only one Blake line leaving England in the Andover Blake family (a daughter of Richard Blake who married Major General Robert Sedgwick although he died in Jamaica and she died in London but their five children remained in the United States as they were adults or they returned to the United States); I do not know the Sedgwick family although there are a number of books published on the American line. There are no matches for my brother's yDNA results (I have tested two our of four of them) in the United States. 

So today I shall spend a bit of time looking at the Y-DNA results for that particular group in the FT DNA Study. The last time I looked I can remember thinking that overall the results pointed to a Viking/Norman ancestry. But that was back in 2014 as I have for the most part left it with individuals in the study to correct me if they think there needs to be a correction or tell me if they are making additions to individual groups. I am great at distributing the work if it possible! I always give credit for anyone else's work. 

Breakfast time, first Yoga and then to work.