Looking at the yDNA project

I decided to start a new post as I go through the results for members who believe themselves to be descendant (generally family lore which I do tend to listen to) or I have perhaps put you into this category or Barrie Blake before me. Since I do not identify people in our study and look only at the results, all members of this group  belong to I-M253. I have discovered that four members have completed Y-700 which is great news. I tend to leave this project to Bill Bleak but have decided to wade into it because of the chapter in the book. Only one member actually does list Robert de Blakeland which is a synonym for the Blake family of Calne. It is a name that I mostly find in American Blake family histories - when we visited back in 2005 NEHGS (and we have been there many times after) I discovered 16 family histories at that time on their shelf under Blake. I did review them all as we were there for several days and it was curiosity at that time - I was very much a newbie in genealogy then and when Gary Boyd Roberts asked if I had any questions - I said no I knew my line and where it had arisen and where it had been for a very long time especially as my father was born in England and I sat at my grandfather's knee as a young child listening to the story of our family. I suggested if there was time designated to me that he would give it to my husband who had a lot of questions. A marvelous Gary Boyd Roberts; absolutely a fountain of knowledge dealing with the early families into the New England colonies. Other than the Dissenters from England/Scotland in Edward's family (and he had many at the 8x and 9x great grandparent level all in his mother's line) his lines were all from Europe primarily 30% German, 30% Dutch, 15% French, 10% Scandinavian (Swedish primarily) and the remaining 5% Eastern Europe (Poland) and 10% England/Scotland/Ireland. So just a very small percentage and mostly quite ancient in his lines having come to the New England Colonies in the 1600s. So Edward learned a great deal from him and discovered sources he had not yet uncovered. Hence our many trips to this repository through the years. I did not get a tally, Edward probably did, of the number of days we spent in the United States from our first trip there in the late 1960s. In a given year it would have been less than 50 probably but it was for so many years. In all those New England small towns people were so helpful with finding the graveyards way back in the woods sometimes.

So a look at the Haplogroup I-M253 but as I ran my eyes down the table I discovered that there were nine new members so I guess the first process will be to assign them if I am able. Sometimes it takes me a few goes to get them assigned. 

A slight detour but I will publish this and carry on with that assignment and be back later. I have put everyone into a group. Two of the groups I just created R-M343 and J-M304. They are both new and I will do a description in a bit. 

There were three new members to the I-M253 group which is the one that I am looking at as a possibility for the Calne Blake family. I will stay with that group and review all of the data and especially the BigY-700. My life has been pretty busy with my cataract surgery and before that I was pretty much living the groups up to different individuals within the study. For instance there is a leader for B I-M223 and for D1-R-M269 (will correct that heading) as well as  AI-P37 (my brothers' group) and D5-R-M269 as well as E R-M512/R-M198 East Anglia. So a fair amount of coverage and the smaller groups I just slot people into them and hope to find someone within the group who might be able to manage it as these people likely all match each other. I will take time before the next newsletter and make sure that that is true that within these groups people are matching each other. The two groups, one with four people, I will try to work on in the upcoming time before the newsletter. I do write four newsletters a year for the four different projects that I work on so time is limited as I am also writing books. As I approach 80 I want to get it all written down in case someone picks it up in the future although will deposit everything with the Guild of one-name studies of which I am member #4600.

But that is exciting to have new people. 

Now what is known about I-M253? This is a large group and in general these members have listed the Blake family of Calne or discussed it with Barrie Blake back in the past or I have slotted in because you match. I have postulated that the Richard le Blague/Blaake/Blake as the progenitor of the Blake Pedigree Chart produced by the College of Arms from material held by the Daniel Blake family of London, England in 1690 with additions into the 1700s. My comments on this particular Pedigree are many and easily found in my blogs. I do have a disagreement with some of it. But the progenitor is this Richard le Blake and I have postulated that he was from Normandy; applied for a license to set up a market in England in 1274 which was granted. I believe he arrived sometime after this date and located along the Hampshire coast for a period of time and gradually moved inward to Wargrave, Berkshire (this is near Windsor, the seat of power) and then continued this movement towards Speen Berkshire (there was a Blake family there in the 1500s that was associated/related? to the Blake family at Andover (my line). This movement continued until we find them, I postulate that, near Calne and indeed in Calne Wiltshire where a John Blake serves in Parliament which is written up in the Parliamentary Archives (there was a father John Blake I and his son John Blake II who both represented Calne and environs in the Parliament in the late 1300s into the early 1400s).

So a little bit of background on why I am pursuing the information for this group and it is due to family lore to a great extent. In my own line my grandfather along with mentioning that the early British were descendants of one of the Lost Tribes of Israel, the suspicion that the Andover Family was related to the Calne Blake family but I would say that both of these were not something that he was totally attached to but rather repeated it probably as it was said to him as a child. What he was attached to was Nicholas Blake who lived at Old Hall, Enham and just who his descendants were and who his parents were. Strange really perhaps as this man left his will in 1547. Finding a number of cherished documents that repeated this idea that the Andover Blake family was descended from the Calne family in the male line (I argue that this descent was in the female line) I decided to take it on and mention it in the Andover Blake book. I am taking this month of February to concentrate on that very notion and the next item to look at was the Y-DNA and surprise surprise there are four Y-700 results so should be interesting along with the other twelve results. This group has really grown. 

Back to what is known about I-M253. It is generally considered to be Scandinavian arising about the same time as the Bronze Age so it not an old haplogroup and likely arose about 4600 years ago. That is 2600 years (Before the Common Era) and what was happen in the world at that time? Farming and the building up of small communities was starting to be found rather than the hunter-gatherer prior to the Neolithic Period. 

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. 

Bishops Nympton Parish Register - 16 February 2009

I continued with the Bishops Nympton Parish Register and have completed the baptisms up to the end of 1824 (three more years (12 pages) until I reach my small block already completed from 1827 to 1837). These are forms now so the information is quite standard although sometimes the priest does name the actual farm that the family lived on - I found my Pincombe line at Park which is where they lived when the four youngest children were born. They lived at West Wood when the four older children were born including my ancestor.

We went skating on the Canal (8 km although we only skated 4.8 km) today and it was a very pleasant day to do so. This is a holiday in Ontario - Family Day so the canal was fairly busy.

I started reading another one of my Christmas books - "The First Human" by Ann Gibbons. Lots of background and I have read the first chapter only. It is interesting reading all of these books in light of the latest revelations with mtDNA and yDNA. Both the maternal and paternal line in my family are fairly unusual making geographic location possible for the mtDNA and somewhat of a mystery for the yDNA although it appears to be a very old English DNA possibly Neolithic. The best matches though are found in the Balkans (9/12) and Poland. But the markers appear to fit in with this very very early branch of I2a as there are others who, like us, do not have any absolute matches.

I am still thinking about my lecture and what I will say. It is just 25 minutes so I will not be saying a great deal. I have to decide if it will be elementary or just a strict look at some family lines. It is difficult to decide although I think I will just do a few family lines since that will interest people who have tested and people who are thinking about testing. This will be my last lecture as I find that it simply takes up too much time being involved with lectures and writing for other people. I want to concentrate on my own research now.

1911 Census England/Scotland/Ireland/Wales

A few posts have reminded me that the 1911 Census is actually of England/Scotland/Ireland/Wales but I will only find my people on the English portion. Just to clarify that from yesterday. I continued looking at the Beta site yesterday and finding the correct marriage partner for some of my cousins' lines. I had located them on Free BMD but I was unable to sort out which partner. Still waiting for Somerset to come up to see if there are many Siderfins still living there in 1911.

Heard back from the person querying Charles Blake and sent him off a copy of my transcription of John Blake, malster at Abbots Ann,'s will from 1797. It is an interesting will and I think I will put the transcription up on my website. Most people that write to me about Blake as I mentioned earlier are looking for Charles Blake's ancestors. I am still trying to interest one of them in doing their DNA as that would be a very definitive test of closeness of relationship since I have my brother's y-DNA done.

Made Stollen last evening and Kulich today, my youngest daughter brought over a plate of goodies so probably I am finished for Christmas baking other than perhaps a pumpkin pie. Christmas dinner though is in the planning stages with a fresh grain fed turkey bought from a local producer. It will have a bread/apple stuffing in the cavity and a sausage stuffing in the neck. Then all the rest of the condiments to go with it. We will go to Church at 11:00 a.m. on Christmas day and open presents in the afternoon. The plans are to do some hot hors d'oeuvres whilst we open them. Christmas Eve dinner will be ham and just the three of us.

I did finish off paying for all my memberships - Devon, Somerset-Dorset, Hampshire, Midlands, and Cumbria Family History Societies. I also belong to the Guild of One Name Studies. I am thinking about joining Wiltshire and Yorkshire and will do that in January.