Introduction

My experience of family history web sites is that they can tend to be fairly sterile database-type affairs that convey little or nothing of the lives they catalogue. In planning this site I decided I wanted to take another approach, as I was in the fortunate position of having had someone else do a lot of the hard slog. The collating of much of the raw genealogical information, the creation of pictures and graphics, drafting the family tree diagrams etc.. was done for me almost a hundred years ago, in his spare time, by Henry ffiske. He published his collection as the Fiske Family Papers in 1901/02 "for private circulation to Members of Family and their connections". I do not know how many copies were printed. I know of at least two in University libraries; I have seen another five or six in private hands, including a leather-bound presentation copy given by the author in appreciation of assistance given to him. I have a copy myself (and would like to obtain another in better condition). It is this work that I have loosely based this site upon. Aside from some photographs of my more recent ancestors that have come down through the family, and some that I have taken myself, the pictures and graphics used in this site were scanned from his book.

After I had started this site I became aware that there is now considerable doubt over the accuracy of some of the records concerning the earliest members of the family, based in part on the rediscovery of certain wills in the 1930s. I am most grateful for the assistance I received in obtaining copies of these later revisions and have now almost finished incorporating them. They were mainly the work of G. Andrews Moriarty, published in various editions of the registers of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1932-38. He was an eminent genealogist and had forthright views on some of the research which had been carried out previously; indeed Fiske Family Papers did not escape criticism, although he was more critical of Fiske and Fisk Family by F. Clifton Pierce, published in Chicago in 1896. I have reproduced part of his critique here.

Most published work on the Fiske family (on the Internet and elsewhere) focuses on the American descendants of the 17th century settlers of New England and, only in passing, on their English ancestors. It is because of this that I decided to concentrate on those who remained in England. I have however included those who sailed from England, and briefly mentioned some of their offspring.

During the course of research it has become apparent to me that Henry was somewhat blinkered about the use of the 'e' at the end of the surname, and would ignore any Fisk he came across (even, on occasion, where their siblings and/or parents had been spelled Fiske). I have decided to use the catch-all 'Fisk(e)' when referring to the surname, even where an individual is known to spell it one way or the other, for the sake of uniformity.

This site is far from complete; there are more background articles I wish to add about the lives and times of our ancestors - where they lived, the times that they lived in, their occupations and migrations. I would appreciate any updates that members of the family in England or elsewhere can provide about their particular branch of the family, to enable me to fit them into the whole picture. Please feel free to e-mail me, any comments you have about the site and how it looks in your browser would be most welcome.

I recently discovered the book In a Country Churchyard by Ronald Fletcher. It relates stories of lives hitherto hidden within various East Anglian churchyards, and upon reading the introduction I found that the following passage struck a chord with me and amply sums up what this site is about:

"The truth is that wherever men live, work, and make their homes - whether by fishing along the coast, farming in the country, mining, building; whatever their occupations by circumstance and choice to be - they write themselves into the nature of things. The trees and hedges, the fields and lanes, the skies over the landscape they have helped to shape, take on something of their humanity. [..] When we have buried the dead , we remember the ways they worked, their jokes, their peculiarities, their characters, the ways in which they lived and enjoyed and endured their fortunes and tragedies. We use their tools, their ingenuities and ideas, after them. In thought and feeling. as in physical fact, we walk the many ways they made. The dead have made the very fabric of our lives. They have entered into us. Their nature is in our flesh and blood and bones, and, in a thousand ways, their sentiments form part of our spirit. To seek to know ourselves is, therefore, to some extent to seek to know the communities of the past which have made us what we are.."

The following is from Henry's preface to Fiske Family Papers; it applies equally to me.

"No claim is made to original authorship; the writer has largely availed himself of the labour of others, arranging their materials and using their information [..] If the result of these labours shall prove of interest to those for whose use this work is intended, or if he is able to stimulate others more competent to carry on a work but imperfectly begun, the writer will feel amply rewarded."

Hugh Fiske