Blencowe Family Genealogy and Research
Mrs. Daphne Austin, a member of Guild of One-Name Studies since 1997, is the lead researcher for the Blencowe genealogy. Roger Blinko, a guild member since 2020 and a longtime researcher of the military history of the Blencowe family, assists Daphne.
An organisation called the Blencowe Families Association (BFA) was established in 1985 as a result of early research into the Blencowe surname.
The research lead by John (Jack) Ward Blencowe 1924-2015 and family genealogists from England, the United States, and Australia soon established the basis for the BFA database of the family trees.
People have been gathering information on Blencowe for years from parish records, wills, indexes of births, marriages, and deaths, the military, and court documents. Each person’s basic information had been entered by Jack Blencowe into a CardBox database, which was regularly updated.
Together with Mike Walton and Jill Dudbridge, he was active in the Blencowe document collection. Jill had combed through record offices and gathered a sizable collection of photocopies of wills, legal documents that dated as far back as 1436, most of which were handwritten and some of which were written in Latin.
They are now accessible on CD thanks to Mike’s transcription work. The record offices in Northampton and Carlisle received copies of the printed materials that were pertinent.
A book on the family was edited, contributed to, and manually typeset by Jack Blencowe: The book The Blencowe Families of Cumbria and Northamptonshire and their Descendants was published in 2001. The Guild of One-name Studies was so moved by his work that they honoured him with an Award of Excellence, a truly magnificent remembrance. In a few years, 1,000 copies had all been sold. Jack was also among the first to try to utilise DNA analysis to ascertain whether several groups of people with the same last name were genetically connected to one another.
Current Research
Guild member Daphne Austin who has been a genealogist since 1970, linked up with Jack Blencowe soon after he started the Blencowe database aiding him with the research and developing a more systematic approach to the data verification. Daphne joined the Guild of One Names in 1997 to complete other family projects and took over the Blencowe One-Name Study when Jack could no longer do it. Since then Daphne has been undertaking the immense task of converting the now-defunct Card-Box database to a fully searchable family tree in the Word format making it portable to most systems and somewhat future proof. The database contains details of over 12,000 Blencowes including some that are alive. Family tree information is available on request via the enquiry form in this page.