Levers is my maiden name and over the past forty years I have been tracing this name as well as all the others in my family tree.

I have just registered Levers as a one name study in January 2021 in the hope of correlating my research and adding to it.

My own Levers family come from the Greasley area of Nottinghamshire where there was a big population of Levers and variants making it difficult to sort them out into families.

Leivers, Leivars, Leavers, Leevers

These are  variants and often one particular family's records will include several deviant records.

My own family is Levers but the ancestors were predominantly recorded as Levers and Leivers. In my particular line it was when my gt gt grandfather moved to Chesterfield that the name was predominantly written down as Levers.

I am still studying the origin of the name Levers and Leivers.

Some studies suggest it is a patronymic from Lever 3 (Dictionary of American Family Names © Patrick Hanks 2003, 2006)

Others suggest French in origin.

LEIVERS IN FICTION

The names Levers and Leivers etc are particularly popular in the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire border area.

It is no surprise then that author D H Lawrence, a native of the Nottinghamshire coal mining villages chose to use the name Leivers in his work.

He named one of the families in his semi autobiographical novel, Sons and Lovers, Leivers. The fictional Leivers family lived at Willey Farm and their daughter Miriam Leivers played a pivotal role in the early life of Paul Morrell, the character Lawrence based upon himself.

D H Lawrence would have been very familiar with the name Leivers. An original business card, which is on display at the Eastwood office of Gillotts Funeral Directors, shows that in 1867, the Leivers family started the ‘Star Livery Stables’ in Victoria Street, Eastwood, next to what was to become the birthplace of the author DH Lawrence. https://www.gillotts.co.uk/our-history/

LEAVERS LACE MACHINE

Also, the Leavers  Machine was a well known lace machine invented by John Levers in about 1814.  John Levers, was a frame smith and setter-up of Sutton in Ashfield.  Patent applications up until 1930, spelled the name Levers without an 'a', but about 1906, foreign sources had started to insert an 'a'.  It was thought this aided pronunciation in France. The Lace working party of 1946 standardised the name with an 'a',  and the trade association then took on that spelling. https://nottinghammuseums.org.uk/leavers-lace-machine/ and http://www.nottshistory.org.uk/books/mellors1908/lacemachine.htm

John Levers was born about 1796 in Nottinghamshire and died in Rouen, France in 1868. Many lace makers took their machines and set up businesses in France.

In the 1841 Census for England and Wales the numbers were as follows:

Leivers 187, Leavers 147, Levers 109, Leevers 37, Leivars 18

In the 1881 Census for England and Wales the numbers were as follows:

Leivers 324, Levers 310,  Leavers 179, Leivars 17, Leevers 12

In the 1911 Census for England and Wales

Leivers 701, Levers 560, Leivers 218, Leevers 39, Leivars 33

In the 1939 England and Wales Register which included women who would become Levers etc upon later marriages

Leivers 505, Levers 370, Leavers 121, Leivars 27, Leevers 24

According to an ONS database (dated 2002, www.taliesin-arlein.net/names/search)

There were some 575 Levers as of 2002 which ranked the name as 10177.

There were 1040 Leivers, 150 Leavers, 64 Leivars and 33 Leevers.

The largest cluster of Levers/Leivers families occurs in Nottinghamshire near the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire border.

There was also a small cluster in Cornwall. No connection has yet been made between the two clusters.