On 27/05/16 04:11, Richard Carruthers via wrote: > I was thinking of doing the list in stages where the first step would be > creating a skeletal outline of surnames for the various counties with > some place names indicated and at least one source cited to justify > each name's presence in the list. I think I'd start with a single county to get a better feel for the scale of the project (which will be dependent significantly on the scope), and allow you to experiment with formats and such like without having too much data to change. I suggest one of the two English counties you mention as being of especial interest to you (Sussex and Wiltshire); although Meath is much smaller, I suspect the English counties will attract more interest. Sussex and Wiltshire have similar sizes and before the industrial revolution had similar sized populations, so on practical grounds there's probably not much to choose. (Both are counties I'm interested in, Wiltshire more so than Sussex.) Is your plan initially to list families rather than individuals? E.g. to say Estcourt of Salisbury, Eyre of Salisbury, Rogers of Bradford-on-Avon, etc. Richard

It seems to me that if you start with families, then there is the possibility that the process becomes circular. There's Burke's landed gentry, heraldic visitations, Victoria histories, etc, and additional information will confirm or contradict these. On the other hand, if you start with records that show individuals - wills, IPMs, patent and close rolls, poll tax and lay subsidies, Common Law records - then the project becomes dauntingly massive. Then you are faced with a dilemma. If you were to search all records - even all published records - you would find at least 100 thousand people and millions of entries. If you have a small number of people involved, it will take decades. If you have a large number involved, quality control will suffer: you will have Wikitree. So it makes sense to start on a smaller scale, with a few counties and a smaller time-scale. After 1400, anyway, it is more likely that people are identified as knight/esquire/gentleman. Vance

On 27/05/16 16:48, Vance Mead wrote: > It seems to me that if you start with families, then there is the > possibility that the process becomes circular. There's Burke's landed > gentry, heraldic visitations, Victoria histories, etc, and additional > information will confirm or contradict these. I assumed the purpose of the starting with families was to get a reasonable initial list of the families who needed investigation: i.e. more a 'to do' list than a finished product. If so, that seems reasonable. The sources you quote are generally reliable for the existence of the family: if they say a family with that surname existed in the area, then almost certainly they did; whether the details are accurate is another matter. I assume that as Richard said he expected primary sources to be cited, neither BLG nor the VCH will be cited, and the heralds' visitations only for period contemporary with the visitation. > On the other hand, if you start with records that show individuals - > wills, IPMs, patent and close rolls, poll tax and lay subsidies, > Common Law records - then the project becomes dauntingly massive. > Then you are faced with a dilemma. If you were to search all records > - even all published records - you would find at least 100 thousand > people and millions of entries. If that's the scope, I have little interest in the project: it's impossibly large. Richard hasn't elaborated on what constitutes a "landed, manorial or gentry" family. I'm assuming it doesn't include everyone who held land (how? of whom?), or that appears in land records, or who was referred to as a gentleman in a 17th century will or parish register. Clearly (or I hope clearly) "landed, manorial or gentry" includes royalty, the nobility and baronetage; nor do I imagine it would be controversial to include the families of all knights too. Or would you exclude these, or some of them, on the grounds that they've been covered adequately elsewhere, Richard? Do you propose to include the families of everyone who held a manor? While there are lots of families who held many manors, and whose genealogies are relatively traceable, there are also plenty of examples of manors being held by just a single generation of an obscure family. Including them will significantly expand the scope of the project with people whose families are frequently problematic. > So it makes sense to start on a smaller scale, with a few counties > and a smaller time-scale. After 1400, anyway, it is more likely that > people are identified as knight/esquire/gentleman. I too was thinking about the time frame Richard Carruthers suggested, and coming to the conclusion that it was too wide. He suggests a period of 623 years, spanning 27 reigns (from William I to James II) plus the Commonwealth. Personally I'd stop sooner than 1688; the death of Elizabeth in 1603 seems the obvious date. This, incidentally, coincides with the period of this newsgroup (defined as 500 to 1600 in its charter). There's perhaps a case for starting with a very small scope; if so, perhaps the Tudor period (1485-1603) alone would be a suitable start? It might be worth starting with that for, say, just Wiltshire, looking at what you've got and then deciding if and by how much to extend it. I wouldn't go much earlier than Vance's suggestion: I had intended to suggest either 1377 or 1399 (the accessions of Richard II or Henry IV) as possible start dates. Based on my own research experiences, 1377 seems the more natural point, but that's biased by the particular families I've studied. The scope can be expanded later more easily than it can be contracted. Richard

As Joe and others have remarked the scope seems enormous, which is, of course, true. Against the dauntingness of that, I would advance the fact that the premiss of making it a web-based project would allow it to grow by instalments just as, say, Leo van de Pas's genealogics has done over the many years of its existence. I think your idea of starting with one county as to see how things develop is an excellent one. Though Wiltshire might also be my first choice, as its coverage in the Manorial Documents Register is nil, since that part of their project has been farmed out to a county work group, I think this points to Sussex, since Co. Meath might not generate enough interest for an initial run to be a success. At stage one I envisage adding families after the pattern you allude to. Still, as references in primary sources are likely to be to individual family members, I think this means that at least one instance of an individual member of a family found in a primary source be cited to justify the appearance of a family name in the list. Indeed, it would seem necessary to be able to tie that individual to a given subcomital locality in order for the landed, or manorial requirement to be satisfied. It would also be necessary to have a quality, rank, or title attached to that individual citation from the original to fulfil the requirement that the individual so cited fell into the scope of the list as being at least gentle. Additionally, I would like to concentrate on creating a list for the first three centuries after the Conquest, inviting contributors to submit material for that period, ending with the close of the reign of King Edward III. Does this seem reasonable? Thank you, Richard