Blakeney Family Historians

We are fortunate to have had two ladies of our Blakeney family who early on produced much good historical information.

Grace [Gillian] Glaspie produced the monumental genealogy and history, "Blakeney Kith and Kin," aka "The Blakeneys 1828 from Bourbon Co., KY to Vermilion Co., ILL."

Florence A. [Puzey] Swank produced a commercially printed booklet, "A History of the Ancestry of the Williams-Blakeney Families, Pioneer Settlers in Vermilion County, Illinois, Prepared by Florence Puzey Swank 1928.” Florence worked at Illinois Printing Company in Danville which is probably where the booklet was commercially printed.

Comments on the work of these two ladies by researcher Herb Depke:

Florence Puzey Swank's booklet is a narrative history, not a genealogy. Although that booklet contains much good information, the story of the Williams family, Melvina Jane Blakeney’s mother’s line, the wife of William Hugh Blakeney, is I am certain, invalid. Her contention that the Williams family, wealthy Virginia plantation owners, was run out of Dumfries, Virginia [on the Potomac River south of Mount Vernon] by the British during the Revolutionary War causing them to run to and settle in Kentucky is obviously historically inaccurate. That simply did not happen. I will skip the facts and cut to what I believe could have actually happened. Dumfries, Virginia was once the primary port for shipping tobacco to England. This fact would support the theory that at least some of the natives of Dumfries might have been Tories, supporters of England, in the Revolutionary War. It is possible, if not likely, that the Williams family was run out of town by their neighbors after the War due to their "politics.” This historical inaccuracy caused me to independently do the genealogy presented by Glaspie in her "Kith & Kin” and I found her work to be accurate.