Hutton Le Moors is similar to many other Yorkshire villages: it has a pub, The Green Man, around forty cottages and, until the mid-1920s, it also had a sixteenth-century manor house, Hutton Hall. It is here that Sir William Sherlock Holmes was born on 17th June 1854. The Holmes family had lived in Yorkshire for centuries: Walter Holmes fought alongside Edward IV's Yorkists two centuries before his great-nephew Ralph built Hutton Hall. The family wealth began to decline from the end of the 1600s, so in 1810, Sir Sheridan Holmes, Sherlock's grandfather, inherited the title of baronet and little else.
In 1819, Sheridan married Marie-Claude, sister of the French painter Vernet, a marriage which restored the family's wealth. Sherlock's father, William Scott, born in 1819 and the first of three children, was only 4 years old when his father died at only 27 years old. In July 1845, William Scott married Violet Mycroft, descendant of a family of clergymen and scholars: her great-grandfather Riley and grandfather George wrote natural history texts that were published and read throughout the 1700s. Tracing this genealogy is very important because, as Sherlock has repeatedly pointed out, a person embodies the entire procession of his ancestors, and becomes the synthesis of their family's history. Sherlock had an older brother, Mycroft, who was born in 1847. Both bear a family surname as their first name. Similarly, Arthur Conan Doyle, the “literary agent” and friend who liked to say that he "invented" the character of Sherlock owes his middle name to a great-uncle, Michael Conan, publisher, and journalist.