Chapter 1: NOTTINGHAMSHIRE
My father's family, named Leaper, is from Nottingham. My largest group of ancestors - around thirty per cent - came from Nottingham and the small towns and villages around the city, mostly to the east. The following pages contain information on the Leapers from Nottingham and elsewhere, but I include a page on the other names in my Nottingham family tree.
If you are researching Nottingham family history Nottingham Heritage Gateway is a good web resource.
At the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, Nottingham people were surprisingly revolutionary, or at the very least, extremely pissed off. The area to the north-east of the city, where my family originates, was the starting place for the Luddite movement, which had the sympathy of their local poet Lord Byron, and a few years later Nottingham people expressed support for the French Revolution. EP Thompson's book The Making of the English Working Class gives the details.