In response to your post Emmeline, Zeno, Albinia and co were not circus people as far as I know. Their father was William Blake, a farmer and later a publican from Buckinghamshire. William had several children by his first marriage to Elizabeth who all had normal names. Then he married Penelope Ginger (whose family farmed at the hamlet of Little Hampden back to Elizabethan times). William and Penelope's first children were Laura, William and Ada, normal enough. Then they started losing the plot a bit with Lucretia, Albinia and Zeno. Perhaps William had so many children that he ran out of normal names. However, although William's father was Nathaniel Russell Blake from Buckinghamshire, his mother was not named on the parish register. Perhaps she was foreign or maybe she was in the circus. I would be interested to know the origins of these names if anyone knows them.
