About us
This surname project is largely intended for men with the surname Blood or who descend on their paternal line from a Blood (we also welcome women and others whose father or grandfather was a Blood). Note that the spellings Blod, Blode, Blood, Bloode, Bloodde, Bloud, Blud, Blude, Bludd and Bludde are all believed to be variant spellings of the same English surname.
New England Bloods: In the 1630s, four men called Blood emigrated to the English New World from Nottinghamshire. Two of these original English colonial Bloods, Richard and Robert, are the progenitors of the vast majority of Bloods in the United States today. One of the admins of this project is a direct descendent of Robert.
In the 1800s other Blood men from Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, and Staffordshire emigrated to the United States and Australia, and project leader Joe Flood is descended from one of these.
Trees for these various families are to be found on https://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/; database names are: richardblood, robertblood, staffordbloods, derbybloods, outerbloods, thepeerage. NOTE: The migration of these legacy RootsWeb databases to Ancestry.com was meant to be completed by early 2024 but as of 9 Aug 2024 this has still not happened, and these databases currently remain unavailable.
The earliest surviving records of any English Bloods come from Warwickshire (between 1129 to 1307), Northumberland (1256), Worcestershire (1262), Kent (1268), and Herefordshire (1281), in all these early cases using the original spelling Blod.
Early English Bloods: The evidence we have at present indicates that the surname Blood (Blod in its original form) originated independently in three to five different parts of England in the period from roughly 1200 to 1400. Therefore, in theory at least, the Bloods of these independent lines should not be related to each other genetically. The problem is, we don't know what happened to any of these lines besides the one from the Midlands, and the others may have gone extinct. Only wider DNA testing of Bloods who trace their lineage back to other parts of England will allow us to answer this question.
Midlands Bloods: By the Late Middle Ages/Early Modern period, the main concentration of Bloods in England was in the Midlands, specifically in the counties of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and Staffordshire. This continues to the present day. Virtually all members belong to the Y-DNA haplogroup R-U106>>L47>Z160>CTS3777>FGC17298>FGC17304>BY60604>FT85154, showing we descend from one man called Blood who lived about 1400 AD in the Midlands of England, probably in south Derbyshire. The Bloods of the neighbouring counties of Nottinghamshire, Staffordshire, and Leicestershire are either known to be offshoots of the Derbyshire line or are strongly suspected to be.
Irish Bloods: Around 1595 an English army officer named Edmund Blood, long reported to have originated in Derbyshire, proceeded to Ireland where he established a line of Irish Bloods of some eminence and wealth, including the infamous Thomas Blood who stole the crown jewels. A recent Y-DNA success of this project was the testing of a descendant of Edmund Blood of Ireland, which has shown that he was, in fact, a close genetic match with the Derbyshire-origin Bloods in the project.
New England Bloods: In the 1630s, four men called Blood emigrated to the English New World from Nottinghamshire. Two of these original English colonial Bloods, Richard and Robert, are the progenitors of the vast majority of Bloods in the United States today. One of the admins of this project is a direct descendent of Robert.
In the 1800s other Blood men from Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, and Staffordshire emigrated to the United States and Australia, and project leader Joe Flood is descended from one of these.
Trees for these various families are to be found on https://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/; database names are: richardblood, robertblood, staffordbloods, derbybloods, outerbloods, thepeerage. NOTE: The migration of these legacy RootsWeb databases to Ancestry.com was meant to be completed by early 2024 but as of 9 Aug 2024 this has still not happened, and these databases currently remain unavailable.
Finally, the Blood Name Study at Wikitree -- https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Blood_Name_Study -- run by admin Garry Blood, has a huge amount of data, information, family trees, analyses, and hypotheses concerning the English Bloods, their deep origins, and their descendant lines around the world.