Families of Worcestershire & Herefordshire
The Vale of Evesham, the Malvern Hills, and the Welsh Marches, orchard country and the cathedral cities of the western middle.
Tap a region of the map to see who held it.
Families seated in Worcestershire & Herefordshire
- WrightThe maker, every guild town shaped one.
- WoodBy the wood.
- HillOn the hill, and the Penny Post and the National Trust.
- WardThe watchman.
- TurnerThe lathe.
- ElgarMalvern Hills in orchestration.
- CoxThe cock, youth and pride.
- DavisSon of David, one spelling among England's commonest.
- LeeThe meadow, and a clearing-name stamped on dozens of villages.
- BrooksBy the brook, every wet valley had one.
- ShawThe copse-edge, Lancashire loves it.
- PerryPear-orchard or Peter's kin.
- FordThe crossing, stamped on Shakespearian country.
- FoxThe fox, nickname that stuck.
- MatthewsMatthew's son, March and Welsh edge.
- LaneThe lane, hedge-bottom dweller.
- HayesThe enclosure, hedged common.
- WestonThe western farm, toponym epidemic.
Historic ties to Worcestershire & Herefordshire
Families with historic but not core ground here.
Champions made here
Famous bearers whose lives or work root in Worcestershire & Herefordshire.
- William Morris, Viscount NuffieldThe Oxford bicycle-mechanic who in 1912 built the first British car priced for the working family, and who gave away in his lifetime the equivalent of more than thirty billion pounds in today's money.
- Sir Edward ElgarThe Worcestershire piano-tuner's son whose Enigma Variations of 1899 and Dream of Gerontius of 1900 returned the English musical tradition to the front rank of European composition and whose Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 of 1901 became, with the words of Land of Hope and Glory, the central ceremonial music of the British state.
- Sir Samuel BakerThe Worcester sugar-merchant's son whose 1864 march from Khartoum into the Equatoria highlands brought him to the cliff above the lake he named Lake Albert in honour of Prince Albert, the second of the two source-lakes of the Nile and the central confirmation of John Hanning Speke's 1858 identification of the Nile's headwaters at Lake Victoria.
- Sir Rowland HillThe Kidderminster schoolmaster whose 1837 pamphlet Post Office Reform proposed the uniform penny postage rate paid by the sender by means of a prepaid adhesive label, the founding architecture of the modern postal system and the most-imitated single English administrative innovation of the nineteenth century.