Blake Web Site

Hello, and welcome to our Blake Family History Website! I am your Webmaster, Brian P.T. Blake. I began this database in March 2015, but the information in it dates from March 1983.  The Blake lineage presented here is original; you will find it nowhere else. Four unique discoveries, discussed below, extend this American family’s direct ancestry back for over fifty generations to the dawn of Western European history. The Blakes turn out to be one of the oldest known non-royal lines in Christendom: descendants of the early Merovingian kings of Gaul and of Germanic barbarian Alaric the Hun, chieftain of the Visigoths who sacked Rome in AD 410.   First, I have identified the prev­iously unknown parents of my great-great grand­father, Thomas Kincaid Blake, Jr., 1813-1892, of Roane County, Tennes­see. Thomas Jr. was the seventh child of Thomas Early Blake and his first wife, Elizabeth Owen, of Winnsboro, South Carolina. Second, I have identified my family’s original American immigrant, Lt.-Col. John Blake of Somersetshire, England, who came to Virginia in 1654 and the seven subsequent generations which connect him to Thomas Kincaid Blake, Jr.  Third, we have "crossed the pond", connecting Lt.-Col. John Blake to his English parents, Royal Navy Captain William Blake IV, 1594-1651, and Martha Nosworthy, both of Somersetshire. Fourth, I have traced Capt. William Blake IV's ancestry to the 12th Century marriage of a putative Sir Richard Blake with one Lady Beatrice de Stuteville of Yorkshire. Beatrice's aristocratic family connects the Blakes to historic figures from the Late Roman Empire, including Emperor Charlemagne, King of the Franks, and Ragnar Lodbrok "Hairy Breeks", the classic Viking King of Denmark. You may find them with many others in the Blake Family Tree attached, using MyHeritage’s “Find a person” function. In January 2009, I submitted a DNA sample to the National Geographic Society’s Human Genographic Research Project and find that my Virginia Blake family’s Y chromosome--the male determinant--is Hap­lo­type I.1A-5. Our primary genetic “marker”, which defines our haplogroup, is a mutation desig­nated M253. Geneticists classify this inheritance as “Ultra-Norse”.  Combin­ing Nation­al Geo­graph­ic’s indepen­dent DNA report with this genome’s geographical distribu­tion, with historical events, and with gen­e­alog­ical records proves that the Virginia Blake Family's European ancestors were Danish Vikings. These fearsome pirates, the Hell’s Angels of early-medieval Europe, terrorized coastal towns from Scotland to Byzantium for three-hundred years. “From the fury of the Northmen,” prayed devastated survivors, “Good Lord deliver us!” The period from AD 800 to 1100 is known as the Viking Age. The question is how a clan of Norse marauders from 9th Century Denmark turned up in 19th Century Ameri­can Missouri. My answer is that about 1,145 years ago the family left the frozen Land of the Midnight Sun and occupied conquered Rouen, France, on the River Seine, the gateway to Paris. In AD 911, King Charles III “the Simple” of Neustria--modern France--bought off the Viking brigands with the grant of a coastal province centered on this strategic fortress city: the "Land of the Northmen," known ever after as Normandy. From this continental base the Blakes invaded England with William the Conqueror in 1066; immigrated at the time of the English Civil War and Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan Commonwealth to Colonial Virginia in 1654; and pioneered west with the frontier.  Our earliest proven paternal ancestor is William Blake III of Nansemond County, now Suffolk, Virginia, born about 1750, whose children and death are recorded with his wife, Phanuel Hornsby, in her family’s historic Hornsby Bible. Our earliest documented paternal ancestor is Sir Robert de Blakeland of Calne, Wiltshire, England, born about 1262, who is recorded as Lord of the Manor of Quemerford in the tax roll of King Edward I in 1286.  Our original American immigrant is Lt. Col. John Blake, 1629-1682, the fourth child of Royal Navy Capt. William Blake IV, 1594-1651, of Plainsfield, Over Stowey, Somersetshire, England. Capt. William, a first cousin of England’s historic Fleet Admiral Robert Blake, “the Father of the Royal Navy,” commanded the 52-gun man-o’-war HMS Fairfax and her prize-ship, the 24-gun royalist privateer St. Michael, renamed Tresco for the Scilly Isle off Cornwall where he captured her. The valiant Captain went down with his ship when Tresco struck a rock and sank while evading cannon fire from Elizabeth Castle in the bay off St. Helier on the Channel Island of Jersey. Honored by mention in the Admiral's will, he has been confused intentionally since 1851 with another William Blake, born also in Somersetshire in 1594, who immigrated to Boston, Massachusetts, about 1635 and died there in 1661. This classic genealogical fraud was perpetrated by one Horatio Gates Somerby, a con-artist who sold inflated pedigrees to credulous clients across America. No-one noticed that the immigrant to Boston in 1635 could not have commanded a warship in the English Channel while living in Massachusetts, or that the William Blake who died in America in 1661 is cited as “deceased” in Adm. Blake's will, dated March 1657. Somerby's insidious hoax has garbled every subsequent American Blake record--until now. Virginia and the Carolinas state that most of their colonial vital records have been lost in Bacon’s Rebellion, the Revolution, the Civil War, and periodic courthouse fires. Without documentation, we can connect the generations between William III of 1750 and his Blake family in England only by the circumstantial evidence which I am presenting in my forthcoming book, Under Brilliant Stars.   In the absence of witnesses or fingerprints on a smoking gun, detectives collar culprits by drawing informed conclusions from a suspect’s prosopography, the biographical, chronological, geographic, and other facts which establish the patterns that define every person’s identity. Law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, such as the FBI and NSA, compile similar general ‘meta-data’ to identify suspicious groups and target individuals associated with them whose profiles meet certain statistical criteria for observation. Genealogists refer to the technique of “triangulating” family, associates, and neighbors as the creation of a “FAN Club.” FAN patterns are especially relevant to English settlers in the dangerous New World, where kinship support was fun­damental and isolated neighbors intermarried. A number of our ancestors descend from second or third cousins. Caveats are noted in the sidebar, but having eliminated every other possibility based on information available, I conclude that the individual who stands at the center of the FAN is the object of our search. Most of the Blake genealogies which I reluctantly contradict are echo chambers whose authors cite each other without independent investigation: authors who, in some cases, ignore conflicting evidence to cobble up a lineage for lack of an alternative rather than admit defeat. William Blake of circa 1680 and his wife Mary Sessums of Isle of Wight County, Virginia, who are not in our line, are fish hooks for this common error, easy to claim because they are conveniently well-documented in a field so confused by recurring given names that frustrated researchers have referred to it as “the Fog of Blakes.” Over the years, I have accumulated many shelves of articles, family genealogies, local history books, and mem­oirs. Combining these sources with correspondence far and wide, I have identified six previously unknown, historical patriarchs who resolve this long-standing conundrum. The naming pattern persists: Capt. William IV of 1594; our John of 1629 and his older brothers, William of 1619, Thomas of c.1621, and Robert of c.1624; William I of 1654, John's English-born son; Thomas I of c.1678, William II of c.1702, Thomas II of c.1727, and William III of c.1750, all of Virginia; and Thomas Early Blake of 1776 with his first wife Elizabeth Owen, both of Winnsboro, South Carolina. Thomas Early and Elizabeth (Owen) Blake are the previously unidentified parents of Thomas Kincaid Blake, Jr. of 1813, my great-great grandfather. It is not possible to verify every entry from other researchers, so we must often rely upon the competence and good faith of strangers, credited by default. Nevertheless, my watch-words are accuracy and integrity. To dismiss Lt. Col. John Blake as the son of Capt. William Blake IV of Somerset, England, and as his Virginia family’s immigrant ancestor would require many new facts and a radically different interpretation of our large, coherent body of evidence. Paraphrasing Sherlock Holmes, “When all other explanations are exhausted, what­ever remains must be the truth.” The standard of proof for a genealogical propo­sition is whether a court of law would accept the relation claimed for awarding a legacy. I am confident that my arguments prove these connections beyond a reasonable doubt. Please note that as romantic as the idea is, contrary to speculation by some relatives we are not related to the Indian tribes of Virginia, the Carolinas, or Tennessee. Furthermore, Thomas Jr.’s middle name is honorary. Thomas Early Blake named his son for distinguished Capt. James Kincaid, the commander of the company of South Carolina Dragoons in which young Tom’s grandfather, William Blake III, served in the Revolution. Most importantly, these Virginia Blakes are Norman French, not Anglo-Saxons or Celtic Irish. My great-grandfather, West Point cavalry officer John Young Fillmore “Beau” Blake, who commanded the Transvaal Republic’s celebrated Irish Brigade against Great Britain in South Africa’s Boer War of 1899-1902, cherished the idea that he was of Irish descent. John’s mother, Frances Taylor “Clary” Chitty, instilled this “Green Legend” in her children and their descen­dants remain committed adamantly to it. But it is not true. Clary’s family is descended from a daughter of Sir Walter Blake, the 6th Baronet of Menlough, County Galway, Ireland, and the Chittys passed this aristocratic distinction down proudly for five generations. But the Irish Blakes are on Clary’s maternal side, not on her husband Thomas Kincaid Blake, Jr.’s paternal side of the same name! No blarney. Their sons and daughters confused the two lines because Clary did not explain the difference. The connection which extends the Blake Family’s paternal ancestry to the Dark Ages is Sir Richard le Blac (my putative given name), born in Quemerford about 1102, and his wife Lady Beatrice de Stuteville. Sir Richard, the first de Blakeland manor lord of Quemerford, is the ancestor of Sir Robert de Blakeland of c.1262, Capt. William Blake IV’s earliest docu­mented ancestor. Lady Beatrice was the daughter of Robert de Stuteville III, c.1068-1107, and Lady Erneberga FitzBaldric, daughter of Baron Hugh FitzBaldric II, c.1040-1088, of Normandy, France. Baron Hugh is one of only sixty-six great Norman noblemen who are proved to have accompanied Duke William II “the Conqueror” on the Duke’s epochal invasion of England in October 1066.  Under Brilliant Stars proves that Hugh commanded the archers whose iron-tipped arrows decimated King Harold Godwinson’s Saxon ranks at the Battle of Hastings. A shaft struck Harald in the left eye. Seeing the Saxon banners waver, William led a charge up Senlac Hill, “the lake of blood”, and the English army disintegrated. Burning and robbing his way to London, the Duke crowned himself King William I in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day.  The Conqueror rewarded his mercenary followers with rich fiefdoms throughout England, seized from the vanquished foe. Suppressed root and branch, England’s ancient Anglo-Saxon nobility ceased to exist. Norman over-lords tyrannized the powerless people; six-hundred mighty stone castles, erected by forced labor over decades, rose to protect the masters from their subjects. Refusing to learn English, King William I conducted his affairs in French, the official language of the oppressed realm for the next three-hundred years. Hugh FitzBaldric II was the first Norman manor lord of Quemerford, noted as the “holder of lands in Marden,” Calne, Wiltshire, in the Doomsday Book of AD 1086, and Sir Robert de Blakeland, also of Norman descent, held the same estate two-hundred years later. The explanation for these facts is that the two families inter-married. Sir Robert de Blakeland’s forefather was Lord Hugh II’s knighted huscarl, his hereditary “companion of the hearth”, the feudal steward of his Wiltshire fief. The Conqueror’s successor, King William II “Rufus”, executed Hugh II and confiscated the FitzBaldric lands for Hugh II’s participation in the Barons’ Revolt of 1088 and granted many of his fiefs to Lord Robert de Stuteville III, who was Hugh’s cousin through Wigeric III of Lotharingia, c.888-919.  Lord Robert took Hugh’s destitute widow and her daughter Erneberga, sixteen, into his household and married her two years later. Robert III supported Duke Robert of Normandy against his brother, King Henry I of England, to protect the de Stutevilles’ domains in France. King Henry invaded Normandy and captured the Duke and his followers at the Battle of Tinchbrai in 1107 and Robert III died miserably in prison in Cardiff Castle, Wales, the following year. As the eighth child and maternal granddaughter of two consecutive traitors to the Crown, Beatrice de Stuteville, Baron Robert’s youngest child, found her marital prospects limited. About 1128, when she was twenty-two, her mother Erneberga and her brother, Robert de Stutetville IV, arranged a socially acceptable marriage for her to the knighted heir of his family’s locally-prominent, wealthy le Blac vassal, whom she had known since childhood. Lady Beatrice brought the manor of Quemerford as her dowry, and the Norman le Blacs assumed the anglicized landed title of de Blakeland. No record exists of this marriage from nearly nine-hundred years ago, but heraldic usage proves that the Irish and Wiltshire Blakes are descendants by blood of the Stuteville and FitzBaldric families of Yorkshire. The College of Arms in London is unable to certify the coats-of-arms of the Irish Blakes and of Roger of Verdun, founder of the Stuteville line, but their unauthenticated design is pictured on the Web. As copied in my Family Tree, the unique, red geometric device displayed on both is all-but-identical. The weave-pattern is inverted and the Galway shield has a white back­ground rather than yellow, presumably to distinguish the two families and to show that Sir Richard’s right to display the de Stuteville shield is from his mother Beatrice. youngest child of Baron Robert de Stuteville III, the wife of the first de Blakeland manor lord of Quemerford.   Beatrice de Stuteville is named for her paternal grandmother, Beatrice de Harcourt, daughter of Count Yves de Harcourt of Normandy, who married Baron Robert de Stuteville II. The Harcourts and their cousins, the Beaumont earls of Warwick, England, are joint descendants of Ragnar Lodbrùk “Hairy Breecks” Sigurdsson, the classic Viking King of Denmark who sacked Paris in AD 845. The Blake Tribe of Galway, Ireland, is not Celtic Irish. They stem from Sir Richard Blake, a Norman knight who acc­om­panied “Strongbow”, Richard de Clare, 1130-1173, Earl of Pembroke, Wales, on the Earl’s con­quest of Leinster in 1171 (Burke’s Peerage). I show, for the first time, that this historic Sir Richard Blake was born in Calne, Wiltshire, England, c.1134, a younger son of Sir Richard le Blac of c.1102, the first de Blakeland manor lord of Quemerford.  Richard was his parents’ second or third child, disinherited by the law of primogeniture. Growing up to find that “his pedigree was longer than his purse,” he sought his fortune the traditional way: taking up the profession of arms as a soldier of fortune. He succeeded brilliantly, and the Wiltshire Blakes continued to name their children for him. Sir Robert’s heir, born about 1300, was Richard de Blakeland.  With the help of my brother John, I have also determined the confused ancestry of Hugh FitzBaldric II’s great-grand­father, Baron Baldric de Bacqueville-en-Caux, 977-c.1040, “the Great Thane of Saxony.” A hereditary Graf Palatine of Bidgau-Trier, Baldric descends from King Louis II of France, great-grandson of Holy Roman Emperor Charles I “the Great,” 732-814, Charlemagne. These royal connections relate Baron Baldric, and through him the Blakes, to the Gothic and Merovingian rulers of early France and Germany who fought for supremacy during the first centuries of the Christian era, when the Roman Empire was collapsing in the west.   Baldric de Bacqueville married Muriella de Clare, illegitimate daughter of Richard I “the Fearless,” 933-996, third Duke of Normandy, the great-grandfather of William the Conqueror. The father of fifteen children--hence his nickname--Baldric had thirteen sons and two daughters, eight legitimate and seven illegitimate. Hugh FitzBaldric I, Hugh II's father, was an illegitimate son of Baldric de Bacqueville-en-Caux. As a blood relative of the Baron’s other fourteen children, their nephew Hugh II relates his descendants to a number of noble families who illuminate the history of England. Prominent among them are the Baskervilles, Clares, Marshalls, Mortimers, Nevilles, Skipwiths, and Stutevilles. How did a minor provincial knight-errant like Sir Richard Blake become a senior commander in high-aristocrat Earl Richard de Clare’s historic invasion of Ireland? Blake’s mother was a de Stuteville, which admitted him to King Henry II’s court in London where he met Strong­bow. Personal ties meant loyalty, the basis of feudal society, and noble families kept careful, long-term pedigrees. Earl Richard de Clare wel­comed Sir Richard Blake because the stalwart young knight was Pembroke’s fourth cousin once removed through Muriella de Clare, Baroness de Bacqueville. Definitive circumstantial evidence confirms their relation.   I have also discovered that Grandmother Mary Clarkson, the wife of Aldrich Blake, descends from Roger Bigod II, c.1050-1122, the second Earl of Norfolk and Suffolk, England. Baron Roger attested surly King John’s official seal stamped on the Magna Carta, the “Great Charter of English Liberties”, at Runnymede on 15 June 1215. Roger’s mother, Lady Isabelle de Toeni, daughter of the lord of magnificent Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire that I picture with her, had borne an illegitimate son with King John’s father, King Henry II Plantagenet. This Prince William Longspee, “Long-sword,” third Earl of Salisbury, is Baron Roger Bigod II's half-brother.  Stable home life has eluded my branch of the family. From Thomas Early Blake of South Carolina in 1776 to my son Brian Andrews Blake of New York City in 1980, none of the next five genera­tions grew up with both parents. For 204 years, either a father or mother was lost to death or divorce before all but one of my paternal ancestors was ten years old. Most families have roots in their com­munity, but these Blakes are nomads. Since William Blake III of c.1750, who was born in Virginia, grew up in North Carolina, and moved to South Carolina at age twenty in late 1770, no two succeed­ing gen­er­a­­tions have been born or lived in the same state, or even in the same geographical region.  With this checkered heritage comes unusual cultural diversity. We have the distinction of crossing 17th century House of Burgess gentry from Colonial Virginia with Otto Van Tuyl, a Dutch pirate who sailed with Capt. Kidd. Our New England ancestors looked King George in the eye and fired “the shot heard ’round the world”; eighty-six years later, our Southern cousins looked the Yankees in the eye and fired on Fort Sumter. Staid Michigan bankers met Missouri and Tennessee frontiersmen; Indian-fighting Texas rebels; and the charismatic leader of the 6th U.S. Cavalry’s “Dirty Dozen”:  Lt. John Y.F. Blake, commander of notable Major Albert Sieber’s Indian Scout Company D.  Seeking revenge on tribal enemies, Blake's native renegades relished combat and knew their people’s secret hiding places. Among them were the intrepid Apache Kid, subject of a Hollywood movie; Mickey Free, an Irish half-breed known as “the Coyote” for his low cunning whose capture as a child precipitated the Cochise War; and Tom Horn, who became the West's most notorious bounty hunter. “Killing men is my specialty, and I think I have a corner on the market.’ He killed one too many and died at the end of a rope.  Scout Company D patrolled the Mexican border in America's final Indian Wars in the pan-fried deserts and high, jagged, inaccessible mountain ranges of Arizona and New Mexico in the 1880s. Today this elite reconnaissance unit would be called Rangers or Special Forces. “(These fierce warriors) required unusual men to control them and ensure their loyalty,” writes Western historian Dan Thrapp. They followed the orders of an unusual man, six-foot-one-inch-tall Beau Blake, 25, “among the best horsemen in the army,” who could “twirl a saber until it looks like a sheath of fire” and was the only white man adopted as a ‘brother’ by Apache Chief Geronimo. In 1885, promising Lt. Blake was relieved and posted to the army’s Cavalry and Infantry School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, for field officer training. The captain who took his place was the future commander of the million-man American Expeditionary Force sent to France in World War I, John J. “Black Jack” Pershing.   “Old times” are a matter of perspective, viewed differently by youth and age. But those who are privileged to know their parents’ parents, or their great-grandparents before them, understand that ‘the past’ is always with us. Today is yesterday tomorrow, and yesterday has a way of becoming yesteryear. Colonial conflicts and the fight for indepen­dence; the agony of the Civil War; the wagon trains, rail­roads, and cattle drives; and the cowboys, outlaws, lawmen, and Indian chiefs of the Wild West recounted here are the pageant of America. The Old Chisholm Trail ran through Thomas Kincaid Blake, Jr.’s front yard. Twice-told as the fire burns low, these tales are the folk memories which remind us who we are and enlist each new generation in the ever-unfolding epic of their nation’s life.  The Blake family’s American pioneers, the “William Sycamores” sung by Stephen Vincent Benet who headed their covered wagons west across the Appalachian Mountains into Buffalo Country, were Viking Adventurers of a later age. The heaving deck of a long-ship looming out of North Sea mists; the creak of rigging; the whistle of sea wind; and the sting of salt spray are in our blood. By age eighteen, our young Berserkers and Valkyries alike can expect to catch an echo of Odin’s rams-horn trumpet, calling our bear-skin-clad forefathers from their mead bench by the fire-pit in Valhalla to put to sea again.     Far horizons--new worlds--the “wild side”--draw us on. Before reporting for duty with the Air Force in October 1962, Brother John went to Tanganyika, Africa, as a bush pilot for Anglican missionaries on the remote, lion-infested Rondo Plateau. Two years later, rather than fly east from his billet on AFS Shemya in Alaska's Aleutian Islands to his new post in Darmstadt, Germany, he hitch-hiked west with a camel caravan carrying beer from Karachi, Pakistan, across the Khyber Pass to Kabul, Afghanistan, and on across the Middle East. Brother Roger was a naval aviator whose Phantom II fighter-bomber was shot down over Tonkin Gulf in the Vietnam War, and your author went to the embattled Republic as a civilian construction engineer. I lived in Bedfordshire, England, for two years and have seen Bangkok, Bombay, Hong Kong, Saigon, and Singapore. With the aid of an AK-47 assault rifle, I survived the Viet Cong attack on Saigon in January 1967 and their mortar bombardment of the ammunition pier at Chu Lai, the staging area for Danang, just below South Vietnam’s border with Gen. Ho Chi Minh’s Communist North.  Moving constantly “west with the dawn,” this restless branch of the family is best thought of as "the Sunset Blakes".