Families of Hampshire & the Isle of Wight
Winchester, Portsmouth, Southampton, the New Forest, the old West Saxon capital and the Royal Navy's home shore.
Tap a region of the map to see who held it.
Families seated in Hampshire & the Isle of Wight
- 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.
- 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.
- WheelerThe wheelwright at his bench.
Historic ties to Hampshire & the Isle of Wight
Families with historic but not core ground here.
Champions made here
Famous bearers whose lives or work root in Hampshire & the Isle of Wight.
- Sir Robert HolmesThe Cork-born Cavalier who became Charles II's instrument at sea, won fame as one of the Royal Navy's most daring commanders, and governed the Isle of Wight for the last twenty years of his life.
- Horatio NelsonThe Norfolk rector's son who broke the French battle fleet at Aboukir, refused his commander's signal at Copenhagen, and ended the threat of a French invasion of Britain in four hours of fighting off Cape Trafalgar.
- Charles DickensThe Portsmouth-born naval clerk's son whose fifteen novels, written in monthly serial parts from the Pickwick Papers of 1836 to the Mystery of Edwin Drood of 1870, made the social conscience of the English-speaking world.
- R. J. MitchellThe Staffordshire schoolmaster's son who joined Supermarine at Southampton in 1916, designed the four Schneider Trophy winners of 1922 to 1931, and on his own initiative and against his own pancreatic cancer designed the Spitfire prototype K5054, the fighter aeroplane that on the production floors of Castle Bromwich in 1940 saved the country.
- Sir Donald BaileyThe Rotherham-born civil engineer at the War Office Experimental Bridging Establishment whose 1940 design for a modular, prefabricated, hand-erectable military bridge carried allied armies across every river of the European and Pacific theatres of the Second World War and earned the verdict of Field Marshal Montgomery, sparing with praise of civilians, that without the Bailey bridge it was very doubtful whether the allies could have crossed Italy.
- Gilbert WhiteThe Selborne parish curate whose forty-year correspondence with Thomas Pennant and Daines Barrington, gathered as The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne in 1789, founded the English-language tradition of local-place natural history and remains the fourth-most-published book in the English language after the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer and Shakespeare.