Somerby's errors still reverberating in Blake family research

I strongly suspect that Horatio Gates Somerby had no idea of how far reaching his genealogical frauds would eventually be. At a bare minimum sixteen books have been published on the Blake family of Boston (can be seen at the New England Historic Genealogical Society Library in Boston) which either use his results or contradict those results. For the most part though these books accept Somerby's work as correct and simply connect their families back to the information which he created in the mid 1800s.

Usually his connections were back to royalty but in the case of the Blake family, he took them back to the Blake family of Calne, Wiltshire known to be there in the late 1200s. He did this by connecting them to the Andover Hampshire Blake family (my own line) with a fraudulent marriage between William Blake and Mary Coles giving them children Humphrey, Nicholas and Alice. In reality, Nicholas at Enham, Andover, Hampshire was the son of a Mr. Blake (forename unknown thus far) and Joan Blake (his widow). Joan Blake (widow) left a will in 1527 where she mentions her children Robert, Nicholas and Elizabeth (married to a Mr. Mylne). No mention of a Humphrey. Nicholas and Robert in their turn also left wills mentioning their children and the witness to Robert's will was Nicholas (Robert died in 1542 and Nicholas in 1547).

The interesting part of Somerby's creations is that he may have seen the Pedigree Chart which I have mentioned earlier and is located at the Swindon and Wiltshire Record Office (can be purchased from them as images at a very reasonable cost). However, the furtherest back ancestor he names as Robert de Blakeland and the chart shows Richard Blague/Blaake/Blake as being the furtherest back. The interesting question for me is were these men the same person? Robert de Blakeland is a bit of a red herring in all of this. He is supposed to have paid a subsidy in 1286 on Blakelands (now Blacklands near Calne Wiltshire). I haven't pulled up that information yet to look at it. All in Latin and my skills are at best rather weak in Latin so it has waited whilst I improve.

How to rid the world of Somerby's errors though is an interesting dilemma and one that has been discussed in The American Genealogist (TAG). Fortunately, the author Paul C Reid has written an article in 1999 exposing the fraud of Somerby with the Blake family and others. Clifford L Stott in the NEHGS Register has written an article on Humphrey Blake and his descendants also mentioning the fraud of Somerby. By constantly writing articles and blogging on these errors it may yet be possible to undo the fraudulence of Somerby's genealogical forays. That he did it solely for money, is perhaps the greatest crime of all. To have done it innocently could at least be understood by future genealogists but simply to make money is such a crime perpetrated against all of us who try to do a competent job of our family history.

I am often having to deny people who write me asking for a genealogical descent chart particularly for William Blake and Mary Coles who never existed as far as I am able to determine. Certainly William Blake is not listed as a son of Robert Blake and Avis Wallop his supposed parents. His supposed children William Blake and Robert Blake along with their widowed mother are not in the Andover Hampshire area living on supposed Wallop estate (Eastontown). There is a Robert Blake at Enham just as there is a Nicholas Blake at Enham but they are the sons of Joan Blake (widow) and forename unknown Mr. Blake. It is the son of Nicholas Blake, William who first notes himself as living at Eastontown in his will. Nicholas and his wife Margaret have only four children: William the eldest, Edmund (minor at the time of his father's death in 1547) and two daughters Alice married to Mr. Godwyn and Elizabeth married to Mr. Monday. Edmund does have a son Steven but I have not been able to trace this line down. William's line is very large at Andover; he and his wife Elizabeth (unknown) have ten children. Robert, brother to Nicholas, is married to Agnes (unknown) and they have six sons.

My initial thought was that all of the Blake lines at Andover traced back to these two men, however the pedigree chart at Wiltshire and Swindon Record Office gives another William Blake also at Eastontown but married to Avice Ripley. Since the eldest son of William (John) married a Margaret Blake daughter of William Blake I was not surprised to find that there could be another Blake family at Andover and I am pursuing this notion that there was another William Blake there at the same time as William son of Nicholas since William does name his wife as Elizabeth. Could they be the same William? It would mean that his eldest son John married his half-sister Margaret. I doubt that happened. It was frowned upon by the Catholic Church and it is unlikely that one would record it on a Pedigree Chart.

My strongest suspicion is that there is a small error in connection on the chart and that Margaret was the daughter of William Blake and Avice Ripley and able to trace her line back to the Blake family at Calne. John who is shown as connected to this marriage was actually the son of William Blake and Elizabeth also of Eastontown (there were several farms at Eastontown according to ancient maps) but the connection back for him was to William and then Nicholas and unknown Blake married to Joan (widow in 1527). The Visitation which was used to create the chart is somewhat unclear on the parentage of William and it is from these Visitations that the chart was created.

The desire to have the male Blake line go back directly to the Calne Blake family may have been just too tempting (the female Blake line through Margaret definitely did do so I believe). Hence this small error crept in and allowed the descendants to use the coat of arms of the Wiltshire Blake family which included the Blake/Baynard/Bellet/Durrant family crests. It was Richard Blake Esquire, Captain of the Trained Bands in County Middlesex in 1662 who first used this crest on his Visitation although by then the Baynard crest had been forgotten and assumed to be an unfinished Blague/Blake crest. John is correctly identified as the progenitor of the family from Essington, County of Southampton. The Visitation is also signed.

How to prove that I am correct is the mystery at the moment. I am searching out material to either support my hypothesis or eliminate it. That is all that we can do as the successors of Horatio Gates Somerby's frauds.

Visitations - Blake family

I decided to look at the Buller family in the Visitations and extracted all the records that pertain to this family. There were a surprising number of them but only one set that was original to the family with all the remainder being marriages into families that were in the various Visitations. As I was checking Surrey I noticed that I had missed one of the Blake Visitations.

This is an exceedingly important one as it turned out. The Blake family in Surrey are the grandchildren of John Blake last at Eastontown and the eldest son of William (eldest son of Nicholas Blake). This is the ancestor of Diana, Princess of Wales - Thomas Blake married to Dorothy Mayowe and the son of Thomas Blake married to Eleanor Hall (daughter of Robert Hall (brother to Sir John Hall). They are using the name Blague alias Blake and their ancestry back to Nicholas is not shown. However matching this up with earlier Visitations clearly shows their relationship to Nicholas Blake.

The most fascinating part of all of this is the family coat of arms that they are using and which has presumably been accepted by the Heraldic Society since it is published and signed by Richard Blake son of Thomas Blake and Dorothy Mayhew. The Arms are quartered with the top left section Blake, the top right is for the Dur[r]ant family, the bottom left for the Bellott (Billet) family and the fourth quarter unfinished except for the Blake chevron. This is the first proof that I have found for the claimed relationship between the Hampshire and the Wiltshire Blake families.

By this point in time this Blake family is probably not in communication with my line at Andover. When Richard (brother of John mentioned) above wrote his will (on his deathbed it would appear) he foreclosed on the mortgage that he held for his eldest brother John on Eastontown. Richard had a large family and was providing for them in his will and probably felt he had to do that. Eastontown had to be sold to pay the mortgage and this Blake family moved to Essington (Hampshire) in that generation. This Visitation clearly notes that Thomas Blake married to Elinor Hall lived at Essington. It is also the first mention that I have seen that William Blake brother of Thomas Blake of Essington had been knighted. He is referred to as Sir William Blake of Kensington Knight. This William was married twice with the first being to Mary Beverley (daughter of Henry Beverley of Yorkshire). No mention is made of his marriages or children.

He does appear on a London Visitation as Blake of Hales House where the lineage is traced back to William Blake of Eastontown but no coat of arms accompanies this Visitation listing. In this earlier Visitation he has not been knighted but rather serves as a County of Middlesex Justice of the Peace.

I am always been ambivalent of the relationship between the Hampshire and the Wiltshire Blake families. The family lore seemed weak although Barrie Blake on his webpages (http://blakeheritage.synthasite.com/iframe1.php) shows the clear marking of the line back. As he traces it back my line descended from Henry Blake married to Elizabeth Durrant (coat of arms includes this family). Then his son William Blake married Elizabeth Power. Their son Henry married Margaret Billett (coat of arms includes this family) and they had two sons Robert Blake and William Blake. This William is then said to have married Mary Cole and their children are listed as Nicholas, Humphrey, Alice, Henry, Robert and Margery Blake. The only problem that I have with this is that the mother of Nicholas Blake left her will in 1527 stating that her children were Nicholas, Robert and Elizabeth (married to Mylne). Of course this Humphrey is said to be the Blake that headed the Somerset Blake family moving there in the early 1500s to Plainsfield. Not mentioning him though does seem odd. The name of the mother of Nicholas was Jone Blake on the will not Mary which is also rather confusing. The other children could have died although there are descendants listed for them. This is the accepted line though for this Blake family in published material. The Nicholas in the online tree and my Nicholas are indeed the same person. I just need to continue collecting data so that I can either support the published literature or contradict it :)

This would mean for my line: myself, Ernest Edward George Blake, Samuel George Blake, Edward Blake, John Blake, Thomas Blake, Joseph Blake, Thomas Blake, Thomas Blake, John Blake, William Blake, William Blake, Richard Blake, William Blake, Nicholas Blake (he is the furtherest back that I can show by records) and then the published material would show William Blake (married to Mary Coles (will contradicts this first name)), William Blake, Henry Blake (married to Margaret Billett), William Blake (married to Elizabeth Power), Henry Blake (married to Elizabeth Durrant), Robert de Blakeland (married to Anne Cole), Robert de Blakeland.

The line down from Nicholas matches the historical material of the time (wills and land records). Nicholas married Margaret [unknown] and their children were William, Edmund, Alice (married to Christopher Godwin 16 Oct 1542), Elizabeth (married to Richard Mondaye) and one that I do not have Ezod (no further information). Ezod is not listed in Nicholas' will of 1547 nor does his mother list him in her will of 18 Dec 1558. However, he could have died much earlier.

I need to transcribe the Blake wills that I have from the 1500s in Wiltshire. Once that is done I may have a clearer picture of this family line in Wiltshire and how it connects into my Andover Hampshire line. At the moment though I am in conflict with all published lines down to my Nicholas Blake. The Visitations have not to this point linked the Wiltshire and the Hampshire Blake families other than the fact that they both used the "Blake" coat of arms attributed to Robert Blake married to Avis Wallop which appears in a sketch of the stained glass window to them at Calne Wiltshire. This coat of arms published with the descendants of John older brother to my Richard is very very interesting. One generation back at a time. I need to find the name of Jone Blake's husband who died before she wrote her will in 1527 and whose children were Robert, Nicholas and Elizabeth (married to Mr. Mylne).

Now the "match" of the yDNA with another Blake member becomes even more important in the scheme of things. I do not have any idea of this person's ancestry. Perhaps in time more will test and an even clearer picture will emerge. But in the meantime this is my first clue that I find to be historically significant that the Hampshire and the Wiltshire Blake families do indeed share common ancestry.