Families of Berkshire & Oxfordshire
Oxford, Reading, Windsor, the Thames Valley, the colleges, the great royal residences, and the upper river towns.
Tap a region of the map to see who held it.
Families seated in Berkshire & Oxfordshire
- KingWhen the village crowned someone 'king' for a day, and the jest lasted six centuries.
- CooperThe cooper, cask and keg.
- GreenThe green, the common before it was a party colour.
- WhiteThe fair one.
- MasonThe operative mason.
- AdamsSon of Adam.
- ParkerThe parker.
- BaileyThe steward of the bailey, castle administration in one syllable.
- ChurchillThe church on the hill, a ducal surname the world recognises.
- CarterThe carter, and the man who opened Tutankhamun's tomb.
- WebbThe weaver.
- PayneThe villager's joke, worn with honour now.
- BarnesBy the barn.
- WestThe west.
- ButlerThe cellarer's name, and the Earls of Ormond of Kilkenny.
- HarrisHarry's son, the West Country spelling, and the Welsh chapel surname of Howell Harris.
- BakerThe baker, oven smoke in every market town.
- StevensStephen's line, southwestern -ens spelling.
- JenkinsLittle John, Welsh thumbprint on English registers.
- MillsBy the mill, wheels on every river.
- PorterThe gate, the burden, same spelling.
- SaundersAlexander's son, Cornish and Wessex thick.
- HopkinsLittle Hodge, border favourite.
- MarshallThe stable office, court rank, surname for thousands.
- SpencerThe steward, from pantry to peerage.
- HuntThe hunter, chase and warren.
- DayDavid, dairy, or daylight jest.
- ColeCoal-black or Saint Nicholas' pet form.
- CurtisThe courteous one, Norman manners joke.
- LawrenceLaurence of Rome, England's Registers repeat him.
- HaynesHainaut or hedged field, context splits.
- House of WindsorRoyal house of Britain, 1917 to today (and Saxe-Coburg and Gotha from 1901).
- WheelerThe wheelwright at his bench.
Historic ties to Berkshire & Oxfordshire
Families with historic but not core ground here.
Champions made here
Famous bearers whose lives or work root in Berkshire & Oxfordshire.
- William MarshalThe landless knight who became the most celebrated soldier of his century, served five English kings, witnessed Magna Carta, and as Regent for the boy Henry III won the war that saved the English crown.
- Sir Robin DayThe Oxford Union president who became one of ITN's first newsreaders in 1955, chaired Question Time for its first decade, and built the modern British televised political interview.
- Sir John MillsThe Norfolk schoolmaster's son who came through the chorus line to make In Which We Serve with Coward and Great Expectations with Lean, won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Ryan's Daughter, and ran for sixty-five years as the everyman of British screen acting.
- Sir William WaltonThe Oldham choirmaster's son who came up through Christ Church Cathedral Choir to write Façade at twenty, the oratorio Belshazzar's Feast, two coronation marches, and the Henry V score that founded English film music.
- David ColemanThe Alderley Edge railway-clerk's son who anchored the BBC's Grandstand for twenty years, presented every Olympic Games on British television from Rome 1960 to Sydney 2000, and chaired A Question of Sport.
- Roy JenkinsThe Welsh miner's son who served as Home Secretary and Chancellor, drove through the foundational social reforms of the late 1960s, ran the European Commission, co-founded the SDP, and wrote the standard biographies of Gladstone and Churchill.
- Dame Rebecca WestThe Streatham journalist's daughter who wrote under an Ibsen pen-name from twenty, produced Black Lamb and Grey Falcon on the eve of the Second World War, and reported the Nuremberg trials for the New Yorker.
- Dame Helen GardnerThe Finchley schoolmaster's daughter who took a starred First at St Hilda's Oxford in 1929, became the Merton Professor of English Literature, edited the definitive editions of Donne, and produced the New Oxford Book of English Verse that set post-war academic poetic taste.
- T. E. LawrenceThe Oxford archaeologist who crossed the desert to take Aqaba from the landward side, led the Arab Revolt across Arabia to Damascus, and wrote one of the strangest and finest accounts of war in the language.
- William Morris, Viscount NuffieldThe Oxford bicycle-mechanic who in 1912 built the first British car priced for the working family, and who gave away in his lifetime the equivalent of more than thirty billion pounds in today's money.
- Margaret ThatcherThe Grantham grocer's daughter who in May 1979 became the first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, served three full terms, recovered the Falkland Islands by force of arms in 1982, and stood with Ronald Reagan as one of the two western political leaders who shaped the end of the Cold War.
- William MorrisThe Walthamstow-born Arts and Crafts founder whose firm Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co (founded 1861) returned hand-craft principles to mid-Victorian English design, whose epic verse and Icelandic-saga translations occupy the long Earthly Paradise (1868 to 1870), and whose socialist platform-and-pamphlet work of the 1880s made him the central English-language founder of the modern democratic-socialist tradition.
- Queen Elizabeth IIThe queen whose seventy years and two hundred and fourteen days on the throne, the longest reign of any British monarch, bracketed the entire post-war era and anchored the constitutional continuity of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth through the largest social, economic and political transformations since the seventeenth century.
- King George IIIThe third Hanoverian monarch whose sixty-year reign from 1760 to 1820, the longest of any king in British history before the twentieth century, spanned the American Revolutionary War, the Napoleonic Wars, the Acts of Union with Ireland, and the foundational decades of the Industrial Revolution.
Stories told here
Legends set in Berkshire & Oxfordshire, from any family that carries them.