Families of Cumbria
Cumberland and Westmorland, the Lake District, the old Norse-Briton north-west, and the riding country to the Scottish border.
Tap a region of the map to see who held it.
Families seated in Cumbria
- WrightThe maker, every guild town shaped one.
- WoodBy the wood.
- HallAt the hall.
- TurnerThe lathe.
- RuskinVictorian conscience of craft.
- FisherThe fisher, and the Bishop of Rochester at Tower Hill.
- RichardsonSon of Richard.
- HolmesThe holme, dry ground in the wet country.
- LeeThe meadow, and a clearing-name stamped on dozens of villages.
- BrooksBy the brook, every wet valley had one.
- BennettBlessed Benedict, Lancashire knots it tight.
- ShawThe copse-edge, Lancashire loves it.
- FosterThe forester's shortening.
- GibsonGib's son, industrial northeast.
- WaltonThe settlement of strangers, England mapped it eighty times.
- HayesThe enclosure, hedged common.
- WebsterShe wove, northern -ster craft name.
- BatesBartholomew's short name, northern genitive.
- ChapmanThe merchant, fair and street.
- MortonThe moor settlement, marcher villages.
- WilkinsonSon of little William, the northern patronymic that bored Watt's cylinders.
- VanceOf the valleys, a Norman name on the Scots-Irish road.
- DixonSon of Dick, a Borders patronymic.
- AtkinsonSon of Atkin, a name from the northern dales.
Historic ties to Cumbria
Families with historic but not core ground here.
Champions made here
Famous bearers whose lives or work root in Cumbria.
- George FoxThe Leicestershire weaver's son whose climb of Pendle Hill in 1652 produced the vision of a great people to be gathered, and whose preaching and organisation through the next four decades built the Religious Society of Friends into a worldwide Christian fellowship that has continued in unbroken meeting since.
- John RuskinThe Bloomsbury-born sherry-merchant's son whose five-volume Modern Painters (1843 to 1860) made the critical reputation of J. M. W. Turner, whose Stones of Venice (1851 to 1853) established the critical vocabulary of Gothic architecture, and whose Unto This Last (1862) was the most-cited single text on the early British Labour movement.