Families of Hertfordshire & Bedfordshire
St Albans, Bedford, the Chiltern fringe, the home counties of the medieval royal court and Bunyan's country.
Tap a region of the map to see who held it.
Families seated in Hertfordshire & Bedfordshire
- GreenThe green, the common before it was a party colour.
- MasonThe operative mason.
- WebbThe weaver.
- WestThe west.
- LongThe long one.
- MartinThe saint's name, English and Norman registers alike.
- RussellNorman nickname for the red-haired; Dukes of Bedford and ten thousand leaseholds.
- BakerThe baker, oven smoke in every market town.
- MillsBy the mill, wheels on every river.
- StoneThe stone, boundary-mark name.
- ReedThe marsh edge, or ruddy jest.
- ColemanColumban saint-name or Nicholas' man.
- MarshallThe stable office, court rank, surname for thousands.
- HarveyBreton battle-name, English orchard now.
- PalmerThe palm-bearer, pilgrimage turned patronymic.
- DayDavid, dairy, or daylight jest.
- CurtisThe courteous one, Norman manners joke.
- CecilBurghley and Salisbury, three centuries at the head of English government.
Historic ties to Hertfordshire & Bedfordshire
Families with historic but not core ground here.
Champions made here
Famous bearers whose lives or work root in Hertfordshire & Bedfordshire.
- E. M. ForsterThe Edwardian novelist whose six books defined the English liberal humanist imagination and gave the language the phrase Only connect.
- George Bernard ShawThe Dublin clerk's son who left Ireland at twenty, wrote sixty plays, co-founded the London School of Economics, and won the 1925 Nobel Prize in Literature.
- Lord SalisburyThe Hatfield-born statesman, heir to Burghley's name, who served three times as prime minister at the height of British power and steered the empire through a generation of European crises without a great war.
- Dame Cicely SaundersThe Barnet-born nurse, almoner and physician whose July 1967 founding of St Christopher's Hospice at Sydenham, south London, instituted the modern hospice movement, the foundational institution of palliative care worldwide.
Stories told here
Legends set in Hertfordshire & Bedfordshire, from any family that carries them.