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| Genealogical and historical information and links for anyone researching their ancestors in England and the British Isles |
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Derbyshire
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| Themes | Explorers and Adventurers | Nobel Prize Winners |
| Actors and Directors | Famous People | Places of Interest |
| Anglo-Saxons and Danes | Historic Events | Prime Ministers |
| AONB (National Landscapes) | Inventors and Scientists | Royal Consorts and Heirs |
| Artists and Architects | Monarchs | World Heritage Sites |
| Composers and Musicians | National Parks | Writers and Poets |
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| Derbyshire |
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| Anglo-Saxons and Danes |
Once
part of the kingdom of Mercia. Occupying
a large part of central England, Mercia stretched from Wales in the
west to the kingdom of the East Angles (East Anglia) in the east and
from the West Saxon kingdom of Wessex in the south to Northumbria
in the north.
Derby
was once one of the Five Boroughs of
the Danelaw (the area ruled by the
Danes between the 9th and 11th centuries). The others were Nottingham,
Lincoln, Leicester and Stamford and each was the base for an army
with all but Stamford developing into a shire town.
 
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Famous People |
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The tourist industry pioneer Thomas
Cook was born in the village of Melbourne
in 1808. In 1841 he set up the first organized railway excursions
and due to their success began offering holiday excursions in 1845.
In 1855 the first continental tours were organized and in 1862 his
company offered the world's first ever "package tours" where
accommodation, food and travel were paid altogether as one "package".
The mountaineer Alison Hargreaves was
born in Mickleover in 1962. In 1995 she became the first woman to
climb Mount Everest without oxygen or sherpas taking the route George
Mallory and Sandy Irvine took in 1924. Her solo achievement had only
previously been accomplished by the Austrian Reinhold Messner in 1980. Later the same year she returned to the Himalayas and successfully climbed K2 on the Pakistan-China border, the world's second highest mountain. She died with five others when they were caught in a storm on the descent. Her body remains missing. |
| Inventors and Scientists |
Richard Arkwright
was buried at Cromford in 1792.
He had invented a mechanised spinning frame which revolutionised the
production of cotton thread. In 1771 he had the new technology installed
at his newly built
Derwent Valley Mills, the world's first water-powered cotton spinning
mills.
Richard Arkwright
The engineer George
Stephenson, inventor of the first steam locomotive, was buried
in 1848 in Chesterfield.
George
Stephenson |
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National Parks |
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In
1951 the
Peak
District became Britain's first National Park.
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Nobel Prize Winners |
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Places of Interest |
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| Prime Ministers |
Prime Ministers |
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William
Cavendish, the Duke
of Devonshire,
Prime Minister from 1756-57, was buried at All
Saints in Derby in 1764. He had died whilst abroad in the town
of Spa (now in Belgium).
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| World Heritage Sites |
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The
Derwent Valley Mills at Cromford where Sir
Richard Arkwright opened
the world's first water-powered cotton spinning mills in 1771 were
designated a World
Heritage Site by the UNESCO in 2001. The mills heralded the birth
of the modern factory and the industrial revolution.
Richard Arkwright |
| Writers and Poets |
The philosopher Thomas
Hobbes died in 1679 at Hardwick
Hall and is buried at Ault Hucknall.
Thomas
Hobbes
Thomas
Hobbes I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death. Leviathan (1651) I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark. (Last words, 1679)
The
writer John
Cowper Powys was born in the county in Shirley in 1872. With ancestors
on his mother's side of the family who included the poets John Donne
and William Cowper, he himself became a writer as did two of his younger
brothers: Theodore Francis, born in
1875 and Llewelyn, born in 1884. He
grew up in the West Country and it was this rural upbringing that
featured so prominently in the books he wrote later in life. After
spending a quarter of a century in the USA he returned to the British
Isles and settled in Wales.
John
Cowper PowysHe felt as though, with aeroplanes spying down upon every retreat like ubiquitous vultures, with the lanes invaded by iron-clad motors like colossal beetles, with no sea, no lake, no river free from throbbing, thudding engines, the one thing most precious of all in the world was being steadily assassinated. Wolf Solent (1929) |
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| Family History Societies |
| Chesterfield |
| Record
Offices and Archives |
| Derby Local Studies Library |
| Societies |
| Derbyshire Archaeological Society |
| Derbyshire Record Society |