Vol 2 No.1 Jan 1997

BLEAKLEY OR BLAKELEY

By Gillian Duncan

Gillian Duncan of Witney Oxon,     Her mother was a Bleakley. Gillian was told to write to me to join the B.O.N.S. by Joan Hadwen of Bare.(Morecambe, Lancs.)

Thank you for the Blakeley info. I found it absolutely rivetting. As you have probably guessed by now my Bleakley/Blakeley researches, such as they are, are still with Joan so I expect you have copies now. The only piece of research I have not yet completed is the Prestwich microfiche to extract the Blakeley marriages where the women are entered - a somewhat boring task. I would be grateful if anyone else has already covered this to let me know as I would hate to think I was wasting my time! I am full of admiration for all that you have achieved in a comparatively short space of time and it shows what can be done when a number of people pool their researches. The only other item of interest is that I am a great collector of certificates and would be happy to send you copies.

I was interested in your hypothesis that the Bleakley spelling originated from an Irish or Geordie accent. I’ve no doubt that you are right. (I have a Riley ancestor born in Whitefield, so not obviously Irish, but on some certificates it is spelt Royley!! So someone had an Irish accent. By the same token I have a Bleakley cert. where the registrar had started to write ‘Bla’ and had to cross it out and put ‘Bleakley’ which tells me that when they were spelling it as 'Bleakley' They were still pronouncing it as 'Blakeley', in fact the eldest son is registered as a ''Blakeley' - very confusing at first in the very early days of my researches!!  The father of the BLAKELEY son did become a J.P. so perhaps he felt he had to differentiate himself in some way? However it is very strange that the rest of the family followed suit so rapidly and changed the pronunciation. It has always been Bleakley in the memory of my Grandparents. Some years ago I was showing my research to a teacher friend and seeing BLEAKLEY she said “there’s a teacher at my school called Blakeley". I naturally assumed he spelt it that way but no, he spelt it BLEAKLEY and pronounced it BLAKELEY. I wish that I had been able to meet him to discuss this further but probably he wouldn’t have been able to explain it himself unless , of course, his family were Geordies or Irish.
I have only one real problem with my research and that is that my Gt-Grandfather Bleakley ran away to Australia! I am very keen to know what became of him but have had no success thus far. I have spent many uncomfortable hours kneeling on the concrete floors of the Bodleian Library looking through Kelly’s Directories for New South Wales! Since then, courtesy of Ted Wildy and Sheila Jones, I have had the entire list of Bleakley B.M.D.’s for N.S.W. all to no avail! I have to appreciate, reluctantly, that James Bleakley having arrived in Sydney may well have moved on to another part of Oz. Worse still, he could have changed his name to almost anything! The B.M.D’s covering the years 1889-1918 are all now in Joan’s possession.  I have very little information but know that he left England sometime after the death of his father in August 1893, and of course he might have died long after 1918 as he was born in 1851.

PROFILE :- I am married with two grown up sons and have been researching my Family Tree for some fifteen years with a four year break in the middle when I almost gave up the search for good!        Gillian