Families of Lancashire
The cotton county, Preston, Lancaster, Burnley, the Ribble Valley, and the surname pool of the textile mill towns.
Tap a region of the map to see who held it.
Families seated in Lancashire
- 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.
- AllenSon of Alain, the Breton first name carried to England by William's followers.
- EllisSon of Elijah, the prophet's name in Tudor English compression.
- 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.
- SharpThe keen one, a nickname kept.
- MyersDweller by the mire, or the steward at his post.
Historic ties to Lancashire
Families with historic but not core ground here.
Champions made here
Famous bearers whose lives or work root in Lancashire.
- Sir Stanley MatthewsThe Hanley barber's son who played top-flight English football until he was fifty, was knighted while still playing, and won the 1953 FA Cup Final in a comeback the country named after him.
- Johnny HaynesThe Edmonton schoolboy who played 658 games for Fulham in one shirt over eighteen seasons, captained England, and became the first British footballer paid a hundred pounds a week.
- Fred PerryThe Stockport son of a Labour MP who took the World Table Tennis title in 1929, won three Wimbledon singles championships from 1934 to 1936, and founded the laurel-wreath polo-shirt brand that wears his name.
- A. J. P. TaylorThe Birkdale cotton merchant's son who was Magdalen College Oxford's senior modern historian for nearly forty years, gave the first unscripted televised history lectures in 1957, and wrote The Origins of the Second World War, which sparked the most-discussed historiographical debate of the post-war British academic decade.
- George FoxThe Leicestershire weaver's son whose climb of Pendle Hill in 1652 produced the vision of a great people to be gathered, and whose preaching and organisation through the next four decades built the Religious Society of Friends into a worldwide Christian fellowship that has continued in unbroken meeting since.
Stories told here
Legends set in Lancashire, from any family that carries them.