Families of Norfolk
Norwich and the Broads, the great wool churches, the herring ports, and the East Anglian surname pool from the Wash to the Yare.
Tap a region of the map to see who held it.
Families seated in Norfolk
- GreenThe green, the common before it was a party colour.
- MasonThe operative mason.
- NelsonSon of Niel, Norfolk's victory surname.
- WebbThe weaver.
- WestThe west.
- LongThe long one.
- HowardNorman guardian-name, and Howard ducal house.
- MartinThe saint's name, English and Norman registers alike.
- 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.
- GardnerThe gardener, keeper of the manorial garden.
- BurnhamThe homestead by the stream.
- LucasFrom Luke the Evangelist, a church name made surname.
Historic ties to Norfolk
Families with historic but not core ground here.
Champions made here
Famous bearers whose lives or work root in Norfolk.
- Matthew ParkerThe Norwich worsted-finisher's son who became Elizabeth I's first Archbishop of Canterbury, drafted the Thirty-Nine Articles that became the doctrinal spine of the Church of England, and saved the Anglo-Saxon manuscript inheritance by collecting it.
- Sir John MillsThe Norfolk schoolmaster's son who came through the chorus line to make In Which We Serve with Coward and Great Expectations with Lean, won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Ryan's Daughter, and ran for sixty-five years as the everyman of British screen acting.
- 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.
- Admiral Lord FisherThe Ceylon-born First Sea Lord whose 1904 to 1910 and 1914 to 1915 tenures transformed the Royal Navy into the modern dreadnought fleet, oil-fired the navy, founded the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, and gave the British state the naval instrument with which the First World War was won at sea.
- Queen Elizabeth IIThe queen whose seventy years and two hundred and fourteen days on the throne, the longest reign of any British monarch, bracketed the entire post-war era and anchored the constitutional continuity of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth through the largest social, economic and political transformations since the seventeenth century.