Nicholas Blake (1510 - 1547)

Born 1510 in Andover, Hampshire, England

Ancestors

Died Jun 1547 at about age 37 in Enham Alamein, Hampshire, England

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This person was created through the import of Weaver.ged on 3 January 2011. The gedcom provided birth as 1510 at Andover, Hampshire, England; and death as Jun 1547 at Andover, Hampshire, England.

Biography

Nicholas Blake of Enham left a will dated the last day of May and proved 20 June 1547.^[1] He named his wife, Margaret, sons William and Edmund, and daughters Elizabeth Blake and Alice Godwyn.^[1]

Research Notes

While Nicholas Blake appears to have been a real person, he was unfortunately included in a fraudulent genealogy created by Horatio Somerby, who is now know as a genealogical fraudster who often created genealogical lineages that would please his clients. Several of his most notorious frauds are detailed in an article in The American Genealogist (TAG 74:15-30), which included the ancestry of New England colonist William Blake. The article points out that Somerby used the herein Nicholas Blake as a linchpin to connect William Blake's ancestry into the forged genealogy that he created; and that regarding the ancestry of said William Blake, nothing can be relied upon earlier than William's ancestor Humphrey Blake (c1494-1558). Even more unfortunately, Somerby's fraudulent Blake lineage has been repeated in many other printed genealogical sources including "A Record of the Blakes of Somersetshire"^[2], and "New England Families, Genealogical and Memorial"^[3], and "Representative Men and Old Families of Southeastern Massachusetts".^[4]

SOURCES

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1} Reed, Paul. Two Somerby Frauds, or Placing the Flesh on the Wrong Bones, The American Genealogist (TAG), Volume 74 (1999), New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS), Boston, Massachusetts, pages 15-30. https://www.americanancestors.org/databases/american-genealogist-the/image?volumeId=13222&pageName=15&previousPage=DatabaseSearch&databaseId=283
2. ↑ Somerby, Horatio. A Record of the Blakes of Somersetshire, Especially in the Line of William Blake, of Dorchester, Mass., The Emigrant to New England: With One Branch of His Descendants, Privately Printed, Boston, Massachusetts, 1881. https://archive.org/details/recordofblakesof00some/page/n8/mode/1up
3. ↑ New England Families, Genealogical and Memorial, Volume 3, page 1435-6. https://archive.org/details/newenglandfamili031847/page/1523/mode/1up
4. ↑ Representative Men and Old Families of Southeastern Massachusetts, Volume 2, page 714. https://archive.org/details/representativeme02jhbe_0/page/n255/mode/1up