Reply to John Reid's Affinity Poll and one decade of researching

John Reid of Anglo Celtic Roots' post on Affinity set me to thinking and initially I was just going to comment after doing his poll but decided instead to blog on it myself.

 http://anglo-celtic-connections.blogspot.ca/2014/03/affinity-poll.html

When John Reid first published the comment by Igor Stravinsky I was thinking that I would be in agreement. But as I thought more about it, I realized that having grown up with my grandfather living with us (and my other grandmother nearby) I do feel much closer to my family that I grew up with then I feel to those people that I never knew personally but that my parents and grandparents talked about often enough actually.

They made me very aware of those ancestors  (and they knew their history back three or four generations on most lines (my mother actually knew her Pincombe line back five generations rather well and bits of knowledge further back)) but I didn't actually feel close to them as a child (was just aware of them) nor do I now having studied them now for ten years.

My grandfather, I now realize although did not realize it as a child of eight when he died, was passing on the knowledge of his Blake family because he realized that we, here in Canada, represented his Blake line coming down from his father Edward Blake. My father was the only male grandson bearing the surname Blake. Edward and his wife Maria Jane Knight had twelve children but the war was to claim the only other Blake male (and he did not leave any sons) and so my brothers have become the last of the Blake line coming down from Edward. I do not have any Blake nephews so the rather unique signature of this line ends with them. However, there are other Blake families descendant of the father of Edward Blake, John Blake (and his wife Anne Farmer), and hopefully they have sons to carry on this ancient line of yDNA. 

Deer Hunters is the name given to my earliest ancestors in the British Isles by BritainsDNA and in my imagination I can visualize our line going back in the Andover Hampshire area to the times when the ice sheets were rapidly retreating and they were pursuing their hunter gather activities. My big curiosity is why did they chose Blake as their surname. Blake as a surname can be traced back in the British Isles to the early 1200s thus far. Was there a marriage of my line with a line that carried the Blake surname so that that male with perhaps no surname took on the surname of his wife. It is an intriguing thought and is perhaps, as I now realize, what impels me forward with this Blake one name study.

Your post reminded me that I have now been studying my ancestors for an entire decade! I feel akin to people who came to genealogy with the computer age and DNA - for me they are absolutely necessary tools to do genealogy.

Comment - Anglo Celtic Roots

John Reid in his blog Anglo-Celtic Roots (http://anglo-celtic-connections.blogspot.ca/2013/12/britainsdna.html) mentioned my testing at BritainsDNA. The following is my comment back to him in that regard:

The All my Ancestry results have now come in at BritainsDNA for my brother and I may blog on them tomorrow. They are most interesting. Again the Family Finder results at FT DNA and the All my Ancestry results are complimentary. However the ancestral depth is much greater with the BritainsDNA results. My brother at FT DNA showed only European ancestry (including the British Isles) as 100% whereas I showed 93% Orcadian (British Isles only) and 7% Middle East (which includes up into the Steppes (Ukraine/Georgia/Ossettia). The All My Ancestry did pick up the Middle East ancestry for my brother albeit in very very small amounts. The colour charts in All My Ancestry are fabulous actually. Since I tested my brother at Ethnoancestry they offered the opportunity to do all the testing at a reduced price last July.

I am tempted to do my DNA at BritainsDNA as well just to see the differences between the two of us (we are full siblings). I shall save my nickles (can not say pennies anymore!).

I need to have a little more understanding of one section where the 22 chromosome pairs are separated into two lines each one representing one of our parents. The one set shows only European/British whilst the other set contains mostly European/British with a few spots of Middle East/Steppes information. This is called chromosome painting and is unique to BritainsDNA I believe.

All in all, I am very pleased with the results from BritainsDNA. They found 287 SNPs of which a number are new so will need to be added to the yDNA chart for I2a1b2 at ISOGG once there are sufficient results to give us the new picture for this haplogroup.

Ken Nordvedt, well known genetic genealogist, first placed our line into ancient British DNA called Isles B4 back in 2009 and BritainsDNA has verified this placement. That has made me rethink my Blake line at Andover, Hampshire. I suspect now that my line there greatly precedes surnames and at some point my ancestor selected the surname Blake possibly a male in my line married into a Blake family and simply took his wife's surname as his own. Since I can trace back to the late 1400s and the surname Blake was being used it was prior to that time.