Family:William Blake and Mary Coles (3)

In Stott, Clifford L., "Humphrey Blake (1494?-1558) and his Descendants in New England and South Carolina: Blake, Richards, Selleck, Torrey, and Wolcott" (NEHGR 164:73-74), the author notes that the ancestry of Humphrey Blake published in William H. Whitmore, ed., A Record of the Blakes of Somersetshire, Especially in the Line of William Blake, of Dorchester, Mass. (Boston: privately printed, 1881), has been thoroughly disproved by Paul C. Reed ("Two Somerby Frauds or 'Placing the Flesh on the Bones,'" The American Genealogist 74 (1999):15-30 at 15-28.). In particular, "Somerby fraudulently linked Humphrey Black of Over Stowey to [an earlier pedigree of the Wiltshire Blakes]. Somerby found it necessary to create two ficticious ancestors: William Blake, father of Humphrey, and another William identified as the grandfather of Humphrey. He then made the earlier William Black into a son of Robert Blake, who was a proven son of Henry Blake and his wife Margaret Bellett." This strongly suggests that this couple does not exist.