White
The fair one.
- Origin
- South West, England
- Famous bearer
- Gilbert White (1720–1793), naturalist, The Natural History of Selborne
- Register
- English family
CoreHistoric reach
The seat of White
Seat vacantChief
No one leads the White community yet. When the movement opens, you can stand for its leadership, or help elect whoever does.
Current mission
No shared goal set yet. Once White has leadership, it sets the public focus: a restoration, a gathering, a real-world project that helps its own.
The White clan is being rebuilt. Join the waiting list for the movement today, and you help decide who leads it and what it does.
Help rebuild the White clan →What does the White name mean?
Descriptive, fair complexion or white hair. Old English hwīt.
The history of White
Crossed with French Le Blanc in the Channel ports under the same pressure of orthography. The Hampshire curate Gilbert White (1720–1793) of Selborne wrote The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789), the foundational text of English nature writing.
Champions of the White name
The bearers whose lives are inseparable from this surname. Each has their own page, biography, achievements, geography, connection to the family.
Historic Places, Rebuilt
Explore the streets and seats the White name knew, rebuilt with AI as they stood in history.
Castles the White held
Strongholds this name held for a decade or more, look one up, or rebuild it to explore.
- Luttrellstown Castle
Held by the bookseller Luke White and his descendants, the Barons Annaly.
Castles that share the White name
The same name on the map, look one up, see what it looked like in its prime, and recreate it to explore.
All castles in England → · Strongest castles in England → · Castles of Europe
Play As Your Clan
Pick any year from 500 to 1945 and any place on earth, the White country, or a shore no White ever reached. The chronicler sets the scene; the deeds are yours.
Notable bearers of the White name
- Gilbert White (1720–1793), naturalist, The Natural History of Selborne
- T. H. White (1906–1964), novelist
Stories of White
Gilbert White at Selborne
1789In the autumn of 1789 the London publisher Benjamin White & Son (the family firm of the author's youngest brother) issued The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, in the County of Southampton, a quarto of about 470 pages, by the Reverend Gilbert White, sixty-nine years old, curate of the small Hampshire village where he had been born and would die. The book was the edited collection of 110 letters, written over twenty-three years (1767–1788) to the antiquary Daines Barrington and the zoologist Thomas Pennant, on the wildlife, geology, climate and antiquities of a single parish. White had observed Selborne and its three miles of surrounding country every day of his adult life: the swifts under his eaves, the harvest-mice in the corn-stooks, the migration patterns of swallows (a question he settled empirically against the 18th-century belief that swallows hibernated in pond-mud). The book has been continuously in print since 1789, has gone through over three hundred editions, and is, by every careful judgment of natural-history writing, the foundational text of English-language nature writing and the model for every later naturalist's parish-record from Richard Jefferies to Robert Macfarlane.
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T. H. White writes The Once and Future King at Doolistown
1939On 1 September 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland, the Anglo-Irish writer Terence Hanbury White, thirty-three years old, declared himself a conscientious objector to the imminent war and left Stowe Ridings in Buckinghamshire (where he had been schoolmastering at Stowe School and writing) for a rented farmhouse outside Doolistown, County Meath, fifteen miles north of Dublin. He stayed at Doolistown for the next seven years through to 1946, taught himself falconry, fishing and hare-coursing on the County Meath country, and wrote across the wartime years the four-volume Arthurian retelling that the post-war publisher Collins would assemble in 1958 as The Once and Future King. The four volumes (The Sword in the Stone 1938, The Witch in the Wood / The Queen of Air and Darkness 1939, The Ill-Made Knight 1940, The Candle in the Wind completed 1941 and held over) became the senior twentieth-century English-language Arthurian retelling, the source-text for Disney's 1963 Sword in the Stone, for the Lerner-and-Loewe 1960 Broadway musical Camelot, and (through the Kennedys' adoption of the closing-line as their post-assassination political icon) the source of the post-1963 American 'Camelot' political-mythology associated with the Kennedy White House.
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