From de Bláca — originally Cadell, a Welsh-Norman family who took a nickname, ‘the dark one’, as a new surname on Irish ground.
The Blake certificate.
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Norman Origin · From a nickname, ‘black, dark’
Blake's earliest bearers in Ireland carried the surname Cadell, before an early ancestor's nickname — dubh, ‘dark’ or ‘black’, rendered into Norman-English as Blake — replaced the original name outright. The family rose to become one of Galway city's leading merchant houses.
Not every family surname in this library survived from the start — this one is a nickname that quietly evicted the name it was describing.
Irish form: de Bláca
