Tuesday, January 17, 2017

Traffic on blog, Will Transcriptions and DNA for Blake family

I am noticing that the traffic on my website has increased tenfold this past six months. Not sure why and must admit that I do not mind at all. The whole purpose in transcribing these wills was to make them available to everyone and assist in understanding the Blake families in the British Isles.

It is a learning curve for me to come back after a two year absence and maintaining one will a day will not always be possible (George Blake's will of 1847 took me three days to transcribe as my life has changed a great deal this past two years - my time has become much more chopped up through the days than it was a few years back).

Today I am working on a will from 1556 and it is two pages long so a rapid transcription is not very likely! It is fun to be back though and I have no regrets on the time that I have spent on the Cornwall Blake family. The work that I have done will be archived with the Guild of One Name Studies at some point in the future. Not publishing it on my blog is a good decision I think. I do not live there; I am not descendant of this family so will not publicly reveal the trees that appear to follow logically from the parish records, census and wills.

The yDNA study for the Blake family continues to grow albeit slowly. As more and more people test a clearer picture will emerge of particular founding families in the British Isles. For sure new lines have formed over time due to acquisition of the name for various reasons and not the expected parent better known as non paternal events. Being able to isolate those founding families that can be traced back into the 1100s and 1200s though is most intriguing and I hope that as the yDNA study grows more can be learned about these lines.

The Family Finder results are becoming quite intriguing as small groups of related peoples have now joined the study. The potential of autosomal testing to link one to a family is somewhat limited but does appear to be helpful back to fifth cousins in a meaningful way. Not everyone knows all of their fifth cousins so the value of Family Finder can surely be seen. Writing up results is more difficult as one must protect the anonymity of the individuals in the study. Gradually though there are a couple of studies that I hope to write up (with the help of other administrators of the project) in the Blake Newsletter.

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