Research extends ahead of me for a couple of days and I welcome the time for that. This has been a busy Christmas and New Years with lots of skiing and fresh air just walking about. It has been pretty cold though although a warming trend is coming and with it a January thaw for at least a day or so. When we first moved to Ottawa there was never a January thaw; that was southwestern Ontario where the streets would run with all that lake effect snow as it flowed into the local rivers. But the weather here has changed somewhat over the past fifty years and hard to believe I have now lived in this area for fifty years plus. We came here with our toddler of 11 months; walking was in process but just short lengths at that time but quickly changed to running all over the backyard. I was so thin weighing 11 pounds lighter than I am now and that didn't change for a few years as I chased my toddler about keeping tabs on her. But it was a new adventure although I did fall ill about two months later but managed until I was better again a couple of months after that. I tried to do too much all at once. It is a dim memory actually those first few months here.
Worked on the Blake Newsletter yesterday and will complete it today probably. I had an email from a descendant of the Mayo Blake family asking if I had any information on that line. Indeed I do not particularly but their closeness to the Blake family of Galway is interesting. The Galway Blake family is a huge family coming down through the centuries and written up by Martin J Blake (published in London, England)) in 1902 and 1903 as two volumes. Volume 1 begins around 1300 through to 1599 and Volume 2 records the years from 1600 to 1700. The books are available on Archive.org (https://archive.org/details/blakefamilyrecor00blakuoft/blakefamilyrecor00blakuoft/page/n1/mode/2up) . There are many descendants of this family and the yDNA study at FT DNA for the Blake family has a number of testers who can trace back into this Galway Blake family. Members of this family are found in many places in Ireland and in England. The best way to look at your own Blake line is to have a male descendant in the Blake line test their yDNA. There are a number of founding lines for Blake in the British Isles (including my line) and many of them can be found in the Calendar of Patent Rolls. I extracted the Blake records from this set of documents when they were loaned to a research at the University of Iowa and I did build a chart showing frequency of Blake in the various counties of England as that was primarily the focus of my research at the time. I did take on the Blake study at the Guild of one-name Studies in 2011 when it was left vacant by Paul Blake who had been the main researcher for Blake for many years in the British Isles as a member of the Guild. So my answer said all of what is above (briefly) and to consider that the Blake line at Mayo could be an offshoot of Galway even if the furtherest back known in their line was a British military officer in Mayo during the 1600s when Cromwell was the head of government in England. Her thought was that her ancestor was descendant of the Blake family of Somerset (related to Lord High Admiral Robert Blake). I think she wondered if we shared Blake ancestry but my grandfather was always quite sure that we were not related to the Calne Blake family or the Somerset Blake family in the male Blake line. Interesting he thought that but people thought differently and learned differently in the late 1800s with rote being the prime method of learning. That means to me that your family stories were passed on by word of mouth generation after generation and that was why Nicholas Blake was discussed in the latter part of the 1800s even though he was just a small farmer at Knights Enham who left his will in 1547. It was this Nicholas who was given all sorts of different relations that created a stir at that time. An American, Horatio Gates Somerby, had created a story about this time period using Nicholas, giving him incorrect parents and siblings although some of the material was correct but mostly incorrect. Amazing that there would be such a discussion 350 years later after Nicholas' death but it was this style of learning that brought forward in people's minds the details of their lives lived generation after generation and caused a rejection by those who were in the know labeling Horatio Gates Somerby as a fraud who simply engineered stories in order to impress his American clients. Indeed the founder of the Blake family of Galway was Richard Caddell (Welsh and also known as Richard Niger) who used the surname Blake after receiving land grants at Galway and Mayo having accompanied then Prince John (later King John) to Ireland in 1185. The email was interesting since the Blake family of Galway was also at Mayo in the 1100s/1200s. But I do not do family research for individuals; I simply tell them what I do know and leave it up to them to do the research back in their lines.
I continue to be amazed at the Blake autosomal matches that I have with individuals in the present coming down from early Colonials in the American colonies. There are distinct lengths that fall into the pile-up or common areas of the chromosomes implying quite distant relationships but the size of the matches is sometimes rather surprising and one gets a notation of sixth cousin or even closer on occasion and I know very well that is not the case. The only Blake known to me that early in the American Colonies was Joanne Blake (daughter of William Blake and Dorothy Madgwick) who married Major General Roberte Sedgewicke 6 Jan 1634 at Andover and their children all appeared to be born at Charlestown, Royal Colony of Massachusetts in the 1630s/1640s. Joanne herself returned to England after the death of her husband in Jamaica but their five children remained in the colonies.
Tea drank and need to do the solitaire puzzles and then breakfast. The days move on so very quickly.
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