There are two main geographical foci to the origins and residence of the family I have included on this website: the Counties of Derbyshire and Rutland.

Rutland was the home of the Speed family and those that married into the family in the 1600s and 1700s. The ancestral home (shown on my home page) was in the small village of Cottesmore behind the parish church.

The family moved from there to Spalding in Lincolnshire around the 1830s, where several of the family took to the sea and gained prominence. My direct ancestors moved from there to Derby in the mid-1800s. Derby was central to the development of the railway network and since the later half of the 1800s at least four generations have worked on the railways in various capacities.

The link with Derbyshire goes back much earlier than this however. The Parkin and Thorpe families have resided within the historic parishes of Heanor and Pentrich in Derbyshire since before the 1700s. The Webster line joined them in the 1800s, having come down from Scotland. The family was very tight knit and stayed close to Codnor, often living in neighbouring properties. Their livelihoods reflected the industries of the area: framework knitting and the collieries and ironworks of the Butterley Company.

Extract from Black�s Tourist�s Guide to Derbyshire (1883):
�The Codnor Park Ironworks of the Butterley Company rank among the most extensive and important in the kingdom, and are well worth a visit from the tourist, who will find here much to interest and instruct him. The works occupy an area of considerably more than twenty acres of ground, and embrace every apparatus and appliance necessary for carrying on such a gigantic establishment. ...about three miles to the west are those of Butterley, the two establishments being connected by a private railway, on which locomotives dragging immense trains are constantly steaming to and fro, whilst in every direction rise tall chimneys from almost innumerable steam engines attached to coal and ironstone pits, plying their endless work of fury, and continually tearing up the very bowels of the earth�.

The products of all this industry include St. Pancras Station, London (as a plaque in the station testifies).