Families of Greater Manchester
Manchester, Salford, Bolton, Wigan, Cottonopolis and the engine of the industrial revolution's surname mix.
Tap a region of the map to see who held it.
Families seated in Greater Manchester
- WrightThe maker, every guild town shaped one.
- WoodBy the wood.
- HallAt the hall.
- TurnerThe lathe.
- 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.
- BoothFrom the herdsman's hut, the northern Norse-locative that gave the Salvation Army its founder.
- HansonSon of Hann, a Pennine patronymic.
- DawsonSon of Daw, a Yorkshire patronymic.
- MyersDweller by the mire, or the steward at his post.
Historic ties to Greater Manchester
Families with historic but not core ground here.
Champions made here
Famous bearers whose lives or work root in Greater Manchester.
- Norman FosterThe Reddish council-flat boy who built the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, glazed the Reichstag, and made the steel-and-glass corporate atrium the dominant late-twentieth-century building type.
- H. V. MortonThe newspaperman who wrote In Search of England in 1927, sold a million copies of it, and built the inter-war popular travel-writing tradition.
- 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.
- William Webb EllisThe Salford soldier's son and Rugby School foundation scholar who, in the foundation story of the modern game, picked up the ball and ran with it in 1823, becoming the namesake of running-with-the-ball football and the figure whose name is on the Rugby World Cup trophy.
- Nathan Mayer RothschildThe Frankfurt textile-broker's third son who arrived in Manchester at twenty-one and built in London the bank that financed the British defeat of Napoleon and the long peace that followed it.
Stories told here
Legends set in Greater Manchester, from any family that carries them.