Veness Family Home Page

This is a home page for family past and future. It’s definitely work in progress, but I’ll try to expand it when I have spare time (which is admittedly fairly rarely!).

On the one side it’s an exploration of the history of the Veness, Hicks, and Dicker families. If you find anything in here which overlaps with your own family histories, I hope you find something of interest, and would love to hear from you.

On the other side, it’s Miles’ own site, for family and friends scattered near and far who can’t get to see him regularly.

Families always have their own stories. There is a great concentration of Veness families in East Sussex; the name derives from from Venoix, close to Caen in Normandy, and came to England with William the Conquerer. I’ve not received the name entirely down the male line, though – it was my grandmother who came from one of the many Veness families in the Hastings fishing community, and also my great-great-great-great-grandmother Mary Veness had a ‘natural born’ son out of wedlock, a story still to be uncovered.

Family histories are anchored around family trees. I’ve put together various trees (in Adobe Acrobat PDF format) – are any of your ancestors included here? I've traced the Veness line back to James Venis in the 16th century.

A key way to know people is through photographs. I’ve recently discovered an absolute wealth of them.

I grew up with stories of ‘great-grandpa Hicks’ having invented the self-righting lifeboat, or some-such thing – I never paid much attention at the time. Later investigation showed that honour to be due to James Beeching, but researching the story in the local press I discovered John Hicks to have been an epitomal Victorian inventor, turning his hand to life-rafts and fire escapes as well as lifeboats – read the story of Hicks’ inventions (PDF format, 1.2Mb).

Another insight into families is through wills – I’ve sadly only found a couple, but they paint quite a vivid picture.

Utterly unrelated is some instructions to build my favourite ‘sabertooth’ paper airplane!

If you’re interested in the Veness family history, contact veness.family@movable-type.co.uk

* If you don’t have Acrobat Reader you can download it free of charge from the Adobe web site.