Families of Kent
Canterbury, Dover, the Cinque Ports, the Garden of England, the Norman shore, and the corridor to the continent.
Tap a region of the map to see who held it.
Families seated in Kent
- 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.
- DickensSon of little Richard, London fog in print.
- 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.
- KnightServant of the knight, not the knight himself.
- AndrewsSon of Andrew, apostle, patron saint, common name.
- NewmanThe new man, the village byname that named a Cardinal.
- WellsBy the springs, the southern-English locative that named the War of the Worlds.
- HartAt the sign of the hart.
Historic ties to Kent
Families with historic but not core ground here.
Champions made here
Famous bearers whose lives or work root in Kent.
- Ford Madox FordThe grandson of the painter Ford Madox Brown who founded the English Review, discovered D. H. Lawrence, collaborated with Joseph Conrad, and wrote The Good Soldier and the Parade's End tetralogy, two of the foundational modernist English novels.
- Samuel PalmerThe south-London bookseller's son who met William Blake at nineteen, gathered a circle of disciples called the Ancients, and produced at Shoreham the visionary landscapes that became the foundation of English visionary art.
- Dame Rebecca WestThe Streatham journalist's daughter who wrote under an Ibsen pen-name from twenty, produced Black Lamb and Grey Falcon on the eve of the Second World War, and reported the Nuremberg trials for the New Yorker.
- M. R. JamesThe Kent vicarage child elected a King's College Cambridge scholar at thirteen who became Provost of both King's and Eton, catalogued the medieval manuscript collections of the Cambridge college libraries, and wrote the Ghost Stories of an Antiquary that founded the modern English ghost-story tradition.
- William HarveyThe Kentish yeoman's son who trained at Padua, served as physician to two Stuart kings, and in 1628 published the small Latin book that proved the blood moves in a closed circle round the body.
- 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.
- Captain Matthew WebbThe Dawley merchant-marine captain who on the morning of the twenty-fifth of August 1875, having entered the water at the Admiralty Pier at Dover on the previous evening, walked ashore at Calais after twenty-one hours and forty-five minutes in the Channel, the first authenticated swim of the English Channel and the foundation of every subsequent long-distance open-water swimming record.
Stories told here
Legends set in Kent, from any family that carries them.