Welcome to our site. We’re Mark & Kim Baldacchino and we live in Malta, the home of our many Baldacchino cousins. We’ve been researching Mark’s Estall family of London for a number of years but are now mostly focused on a One-Name study of Kim’s Eastlake family including many variant names such as Estlake, Estlack, Eastlack, Eslick, Estlick, Easlick and Eastlick. These families extend around the world and you can see what we’ve found at our Eastlake One-Name Study website.
As we studied the Eastlake name, we discovered (and we weren’t the first to do so!) that the surname originated in a place called Byestelake, identified in the Assise Rolls of 1244. Amazingly, this place was near the village of Bratton Clovelly only an hour or so away from where we were living at the time in Taunton. We drove over and found Eastlake Farm, a dairy farm still at or near the same location as the original homestead. Then we made our way to Clovelly Inn where the people were very friendly and we began to discover a beautiful and welcoming village. Soon, we wanted to learn not just about our family, who actually left the area in the 1500s, but also about the village itself. So we started a One-Place Study on Bratton Clovelly, the subject of this website.
Kim descends from a Quaker named Francis Estlack or Eastlack through her grandmother, Marion Elizabeth Blackmon nee Eastlack (1910-1999). For many decades, the collective family view was that Francis was born in Plymouth, Devon in about 1630 and sailed for Bermuda in the 1650s due to persecution. But we finally discovered that it was Francis’ father who sailed to Bermuda to become one of the earliest Bermudan settlers and that’s where Francis was born. In the 1680s, Francis moved with his wife and children to New Jersey who began establishing the North American family lines, not far from Kim’s birthplace in Maryland. We really appreciate all that we’ve learned to date, with the help of many other researchers of the family, and we look forward to what Bratton Clovelly has in store. We hope that you enjoy your own discoveries as much as we’ve enjoyed ours.
