Vick Families of Gloucestershire and Herefordshire from the Sixteenth through the Eighteenth Centuries

This project began with the quest to find the English origins of Joseph Vick, a seventeenth-century settler of Isle of Wight County, Virginia, who likely originated in Gloucestershire.  That search revealed that on 18 October, 1669, Joseph Fick and Elizabeth Fick were both apprenticed in Bristol to serve four years under Roger Dixon in Virginia.  Almost certainly this is the correct Joseph with perhaps his sister Elizabeth, but they have not been found after comprehensive searches of Bristol, Gloucestershire, and Herefordshire parish registers, court records, and probate records.  

What remains of that search is an exploration of the documented Vick families in Gloucestershire and Herefordshire - those that can be identified in the records of parishes, wills, and feoffments.  Church records of this period have gaps.  The English Civil War wreaked havoc on the keeping of records in the key timeframe of the 1640s and 1650s.  Persons with the Vick surname and variants appear and disappear in these records, making it extremely difficult to find evidence.  The records are diverse enough to suggest that if all of these Vick families share a common ancestor, that person must have lived there perhaps as far back as the fourteenth century.  Probate records are cited where they exist, but many Vicks died without either a will or inventory, making it difficult to determine precisely who their children were, especially when baptismal records are spotty.  The names of mothers seldom appear in baptismal records until the late eighteenth century.  Added to the problem was the general poverty of the area and the fact that these agricultural laborers often moved frequently.  

The identity of Joseph Vick, the Virginia immigrant born about 1650, remains elusive and has not been determined from these records.  Perhaps he was born at Randwick or Kings Stanley during the period when the Bishops' Transcripts are lost.  Finding his precise origins was the chief objective of this study, but it has not proven successful to date.  It is likely that he was an illegitimate child whose baptism was either never recorded or lost in the gaps of those records.

John D. Beatty

2025, 8.5" x 11", paper, 82 pp.

ISBN: 9798986480435

101-B8043