Rosemary,

The three (usually) brothers origin is boiler plate that that companies would attach to coats of arms that they would sell people. Every surname had similar origins and many incorporated it in family traditions. At the time, doing the needed research was very difficult because of travel difficulties.

However, in the fifties or sixties Louise McDonald and other researchers started collecting Blanton research. Her work is on the Blanton Family Historians site:

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~blantonroo...

I have posted corrections here:

http://genforum.genealogy.com/blanton/messages/3219.html

There are a lot of discredited genealogies on the web, however.

We have also done DNA testing and have found that three of the Blanton families are related. However, the immigrants came at different times. They are:

(1) Blanton/Blantine/Blanding. They are all descended from William Blanton/Blantine who arrived in Boston about 1642. They now spell their names Blanding or Blandin.

(2) Tidewater Blantons. They are descended from Thomas Blanton, who is first recorded in 1682 in Essex County VA. If you find a genealogy that shows that John Blanton of Lancashire Eng. was his father, it is bogus. There is simply no evidence for the name of his father.

(3) Southwest VA Blantons. These are descendants of William Blanton of Lee (now Wise)County VA and John Blanton of Harlan County KY. Some bogus genealogies show them as descendants of Thomas above. However, there is no evidence. It is likely they were immigrants.

Another group is the Womack-Blantons, who are actually descended from Abraham Womack, who cohabited with the widow of Thomas Blanton, Jr. They had two sons. One used the name Thomas Womack and the other used the name Archer/Archee. He had four sons, Jeremiah, William, Claiborne and Obediah, who lived in Rutherford County NC. They are often shown in bogus genealogies as sons of William of Lee VA.