Families of Derbyshire & the Peak
Derby and the High Peak, Bess of Hardwick country, the limestone Dales, and the surnames of the Derbyshire Dales.
Tap a region of the map to see who held it.
Families seated in Derbyshire & the Peak
- WardThe watchman.
- ColemanColumban saint-name or Nicholas' man.
- SpencerThe steward, from pantry to peerage.
- PalmerThe palm-bearer, pilgrimage turned patronymic.
- HaynesHainaut or hedged field, context splits.
- CavendishDukes of Devonshire, the Chatsworth dynasty.
- LoweDweller by the mound, a Marches hill-name.
- BurtonThe fortified farmstead, a name from a hundred villages.
- BradleyThe broad clearing in the wood.
Historic ties to Derbyshire & the Peak
Families with historic but not core ground here.
Champions made here
Famous bearers whose lives or work root in Derbyshire & the Peak.
- Samuel RichardsonThe Derbyshire joiner's son who came to London as a printer's apprentice, ran his own press off Fleet Street, and in his fifties wrote Pamela and Clarissa, the foundational works of the modern English psychological novel.
- Dame Laura KnightThe Long Eaton lace-designer's daughter who won an art scholarship at thirteen, painted alongside the Newlyn and Lamorna colonies, became the first woman elected a full Royal Academician in 1936, and served as a war artist at the Nuremberg trial.
- Henry CavendishThe reclusive grandson of two dukes who isolated hydrogen in 1766, proved water to be a compound, and in his Clapham garden weighed the Earth.
- Herbert SpencerThe Derby Dissenting schoolmaster's son whose nine-volume System of Synthetic Philosophy (1860 to 1896) built the foundational evolutionary social theory of the Victorian century, whose 1864 Principles of Biology coined the phrase survival of the fittest, and who at his death in 1903 was the most-translated single philosopher in the English-speaking world.