My most frustrating brick wall

Reading Peter's very interesting piece about brick walls in the latest newsletter encouraged me to share my longest-standing and most important (to me) brick wall, and how I'm getting on with breaking it down.

I started researching over 40 years ago and began, as many do, with my male line. I hit a brick wall with my 3xgreat grandfather, John Bloor, who married at West Hallam, Derbyshire, in 1809. From the 1841 census and his death certificate I estimated his birth around 1782 (in Derbyshire, according to the 1841 census). Frustratingly he died before 1851. Despite searching for 40 years I have never found a baptism for him.

Fast forward to about 10 years ago, the Bloor Society One Name group were doing Y DNA testing so I submitted my DNA. The results suggested that my Y DNA came from a line of Bloors who started off in Chaddesden and one branch ended up in Dale Abbey (the parish next door to West Hallam) in the 1750s. The family that moved there were a William Bloor, his wife Sarah, and their children Mary, William and Samuel. There was also a Robert Bloor who, for various reasons, the Bloor Society believe is their 4th child, but no baptism has ever been found. I already knew that Robert Bloor had a son named John born in 1782, but this John grew up to be the parish clerk of Dale Abbey, so clearly not my John.

Later on I did an autosomal test with Ancestry, and so did my 4th cousin, who is also descended from John Bloor but via a different son. He gave me access to his results so that I can look at our shared matches. Most of our shared matches can be allocated as descendants of John Bloor via different children, but there are a few smaller matches that seem to link in further back. It is these that I am concentrating on.

The theory I am working on is that my ancestor John Bloor is a son of Samuel Bloor of Dale Abbey whose baptism was not recorded (or he was never baptised). Samuel Bloor and his wife Lydia Wright have only two baptisms recorded, two sons William and Samuel baptised seven years apart (1777 and 1784). William had descendants but Samuel didn't. That seven year gap seems suspicious to me and when I obtained a copy of Samuel Jnr's will it revealed that he had a sister Sarah whose marriage to John Brighouse at Dale Abbey is recorded in 1801. I can find Sarah on later censuses and her date of birth was around 1779 or 1780, but there is no baptism recorded for her. So could my John have also slotted into this family in 1782?

I have DNA matches to descendants of Samuel and Lydia's children William and Sarah, as does my 4th cousin. One problem I have is that Lydia Bloor died and Samuel remarried and had other children. One of these children from the second marriage had a daughter who married my great great grandfather David Bloor, so if my theory about John is correct my great great grandparents were half first cousins, and I cannot draw any conclusions about John's origins from any of my own DNA matches unless these people also match my 4th cousin.

So I started looking for Lydia Wright, because if I could find a DNA match to one of her relatives, that would support my theory. Now Wright is a common surname and Lydia's age at death wasn't recorded so the best I could do was to look for a Lydia Wright who was a similar age to Samuel Bloor and lived not too far away from Dale Abbey. I found someone born in Derby who fitted the bill and I traced her line back a couple of generations, and landed on a family named Cock who lived in Aston on Trent, Derbyshire. This is where things got interesting because I had a DNA match of around 25cM with a lady who had an ancestor named Harrison Cock. He was born in Northamptonshire about 50 years after the Cock family that I'd found were in Aston on Trent. I also had another group of matches, related to each other, who descended from a couple who emigrated to New Zealand. The husband and wife who emigrated were born in Burton on Trent and Northamptonshire respectively. Some of these matches have uploaded to FTDNA and/or myheritage so I know that they all share the same segment on chromosome 1 with myself and my 4th cousin. If I can find the connection between them all, and connect it to the Cock family in Aston on Trent, I think I'll have my answer.