Also known as the Dikes

Origins ...

The earliest record of our Dykes / Dikes ancestors is at the beginning of the 19th century in Heybridge, Essex. All the Dykes / Dikes living in the Maldon and Heybridge area since then have been descendants of this one person.

Family legend has it that the Dykes came from "Foreign Parts". The nearest concentration of Dykes in the late 18th and early 19th century is in Suffolk (hardly foreign!) but an intriguing possibility is that they came from the North East of England and even, possibly, from Sunderland where my branch of the family settled in the latter half of the 19th century. Somebody with a North East acent might have been quite "foreign" to Essex folk!