My name is John Marks and I started this site.
This site was created using MyHeritage.com. This is a great system that allows anyone like you and me to create a private site for their family, build their family tree and share family photos. If you have any comments or feedback about this site, please click here to contact me.
Our family tree is posted online on this site! There are 971 names in our family site. The earliest event is the birth of Richard Markes (1513). The most recent event is the birth of <Private> van de Westerhuizen (Apr 2011).
The site was last updated on May 25 2012, and it currently has 22 registered member(s). If you wish to become a member too, please click here.  

The earliest record available for the Marks family so far is in Barnstaple, Devon, England where Richard Marks married Agnes Lang on May 24, 1540.  It was toward the end of the reign of Henry VIII and during a tempestuous period of British history.

While there is no record of Richard's background all indications are that the family is as old as England itself. The names Richard, George and William marking the early generations were common in England at the time and working class occupations listed against some of them indicate that the family were simple working folk. In the third recorded generation when the family moved to South Tawton, William Marks married Gertrude Wonston.  Her name and that of Johanna, given to their oldest surviving daughter suggest the possibility of a Teutonic influence in the early line.  This potentially dates from the Saxon invasion of Britain (400 - 900AD) and then absorbed into the Anglo-Saxon nomenclature.   While William is also an old Anglo-Saxon name  of Germanic origin it became most popular in Britain after the Norman Invasion of William the Conqueror in 1066.  Many of the first names later attached to the family have a Jewish flavour and, as the name Marks is common also in that faith,  some earlier family researchers  speculated on a possible Hebrew background.   However, the early generations had very "Christian" names and from the earliest English records the Marks family worshiped in Christian churches in Devon and Cornwall. Some of their names remain visibly Anglican, inscribed on ancient gravestones at Saltash in Devon and Rame and Cawsand in Cornwall.   Therefore Jewish ancestry is rather unlikely.  About the time the first Marks names were recorded, the Tudor queen Elizabeth I succeeded to the English throne, inheriting a country pulled apart by religious confusion as Protestants and Catholics struggled for ecclesiastical control of England.  Her father Henry VIII, who separated Britain from the papal supremacy of the Roman Catholic church had opened the way for protestantism to flourish in Britain.Information supplied  by  Shaun Killerby, a maternal descendant of the New Zealand Hannibal, suggests that the early family was not too far from that historic religious action.  The home town of Richard and Agnes Marks was Barnstable, a port market town and agricultural centre on Devon's coast at the Northern end of the road to the ancient walled city of Exeter.  Shaun found that Exeter was prominent in the Western Rebellion of 1549, when Devonian and Cornish parishoners unsuccessfully stormed its walls in protest against the introduction of the first Common Book of English Prayer. The surname Markes/Marks itself probably is a Latin derivation of the Roman name Marcus which could have survived any of the above routes to the 16th century and has emerged in Norman French, English, German and ancient English iterations.  With certainty though, in the four and a half centuries which followed the birth of our known line the core Marks family was as English as it was possible to be, putting their roots deep into the West Country soil and as seamen sailing the world during the period of Britain's greatest influence as a seafaring nation.   Along the way, as in every family they, left a diverse trail of human experience ranging from piracy, smuggling and illigitimacy to heroism and high honour. In particular it is a matter of record that the tiny coastal Cornish townships of Cawsand and Kingsand were centres of lawless smuggling in the 18th and 19th centuries and although one of our ancestors is reputed to have been an officer on HMS Victory (which became Lord Nelson's flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar) many were likely to have had less civic minded occupations.Now the Marks family has dispersed around the world and no one branch can have any idea how wide we are now spread, or how many descendants followed Richard and Agnes. Of course the name of my father is only a focus on a site like this.  Throughout the family tree hundreds of families unite and new branches have stretched around the world sharing both blood and marriage relationships which enrich and extend the family history.A site like this promises to unite so many strands in the family web.  Hopefully it will live on and grow as more and more families recognise how easy it is to connect and explore.