Families of South Yorkshire
Sheffield, Barnsley, Doncaster, the cutlery trades, the coalfield, and the surnames of the Don and Dearne valleys.
Tap a region of the map to see who held it.
Families seated in South Yorkshire
- RobinsonSon of Robin, the Danelaw's favourite -son, and the first woman President of Ireland.
- ThompsonThe northern Thomases.
- HallAt the hall.
- CookThe cook.
- FisherThe fisher, and the Bishop of Rochester at Tower Hill.
- HolmesThe holme, dry ground in the wet country.
- JacksonSon of Jack, the industrial north's signature.
- BennettBlessed Benedict, Lancashire knots it tight.
- MillerThe miller, water and wind before steam.
- SimpsonSimon's son, Tyne to Tees, and the Edinburgh obstetrician of chloroform.
- WaltonThe settlement of strangers, England mapped it eighty times.
- WebsterShe wove, northern -ster craft name.
- BatesBartholomew's short name, northern genitive.
- MortonThe moor settlement, marcher villages.
- JohnsonSon of John, the most-Anglo-Saxon-sounding Norman name in the English census.
- 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.
- SharpThe keen one, a nickname kept.
- MyersDweller by the mire, or the steward at his post.
Historic ties to South Yorkshire
Families with historic but not core ground here.
Champions made here
Famous bearers whose lives or work root in South Yorkshire.
- Sir George PorterThe South Yorkshire railway-clerk's son who developed flash photolysis at Cambridge in the late 1940s, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it in 1967, ran the Royal Institution for nineteen years, and served as President of the Royal Society at the close of the twentieth century.
- Herbert ChapmanThe Yorkshire mining engineer who invented the modern football manager, built title-winning dynasties at Huddersfield and Arsenal, and died in harness with the game remade in his image.
- 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 personal verdict of Field Marshal Montgomery that without the Bailey bridge we would not have won the war.