We study lower bounds of a general family of L-functions on the $1$ -line. More precisely, we show that for any $F(s)$ in this family, there exist arbitrarily large t such that $F(1+it)\geq e^{\gamma _F} (\log _2 t + \log _3 t)^m + O(1)$ , where m is the order of the pole of $F(s)$ at $s=1$ . This is a generalisation of the result of Aistleitner, Munsch and Mahatab [‘Extreme values of the Riemann zeta function on the $1$ -line’, Int. Math. Res. Not. IMRN2019(22) (2019), 6924–6932]. As a consequence, we get lower bounds for large values of Dedekind zeta-functions and Rankin-Selberg L-functions of the type $L(s,f\times f)$ on the $1$ -line.