On 23/05/16 23:31, Richard Carruthers via wrote: > I wonder if there has been any attempt to create a web-based listing, > more or less comprehensive, of all the Landed, Manorial, or Gentry > Families in England, Wales, and the Irish Pale, on a county by county > basis for the period, say, 1066-1688 (taking the Conquest and the end > of Heraldic Visitations to be reasonable rough dates for coverage)? > > If not, is anyone else interested in the creation of such a list, > and/or contributing to it? > > It might be useful to create such a listing as a group project so that > registered people can add to it (with some kind of justification based > on at least one primary source for such a claim). This could be a good > opportunity for a lot of expertise that might otherwise not get > recorded to be preserved and made more widely available to serious > researchers. > > To it could be added various kinds of information such as whether > there has been anything scholarly (or not) published on a given > family, or whether anyone is known to be engaged in a study of a given > family. > > Enthusiasts of a given area or surname or group of families could link > to it other resources that may be useful for the study of that family, > area, or grouping. Firstly we need to decide what an item on such a list might be. A direct quote from a source is one thing. Go beyond that and you start to mix analysis and interpretation. Take, for instance, a mention in a will of "my daughter"; is it the testator's biological and legitimate daughter, a daughter-in-law (to use the modern term), a step-daughter, a god-daughter or even an illegitimate daughter? As soon as we list her as "daughter of X" rather than "named in his will as daughter of X" we have, however unwittingly, made an analysis of the source rather than leaving the original there for others to decide on for themselves. If, after looking at various sources we decide that various pieces of evidence are all pointing to the same person and that decision is what we list we're putting forward our interpretation, or reconstruction. Such reconstructions are likely to change with time as more evidence becomes available. None of these are wrong things to do but it needs to be made clear to the reader what's being presented, and the reasoning behind it. Failure to provide for this is the huge weakness of GEDCOM and leads to some massive howlers of misreadings being propagated through to databases built with its aid[sic]. Secondly I see no reason to set lower limits on the status of families. Partly this is because of reasons I cited in another post - a family who might have made it over the threshold in a later period might not have been so prominent earlier or in other geographical areas. The Wordsworths, for instance became lords of the manor of Penistone in the C18th when, as Hey says, it didn't count for much but a more geographically distant branch produced one of our more significant poets. Or prominent in other significant respects - the Bearsell family goes back locally to the 1330s or thereabouts but their real local importance is in their role in the transition of the textile industry from the domestic to the factory system. Another is that I think that there may be geographical limits to the concept of landed gentry. It's one that fits nicely into Rackham's planned countryside, not so well into the Pennine countryside I'm familiar with and probably not into much of the rest of England's highland zone. I can think of a number of local houses dating back to the C17th or probably earlier which in size and style might match manor houses elsewhere but, because of the history of the area are simply the largest houses of their particular townships within a much larger manor. In other areas the Greens, Broadheads and Woodheads of such houses might well have been regarded as gentry. Also, especially when we take a look at things from a local perspective, there may be as much detail for the tenantry as for the gentry. From the Wakefield manorial rolls for instance I can pinpoint the origin of the surname Hinchliffe to within 10 years. Littlewoods are more difficult as that name is present in the earliest records. Such families may never have been ranked as gentry anywhere, nevertheless they were as real as any who were and they are as important as any other family to their descendants. It's as well to remember that genealogy is about more than working out how many lines of descent one has from Edward III or Charlemagne (zero is a perfectly acceptable number). However humble the family, they all count. Thirdly, as to organisation, the open source concept of a maintainer is something to look at. Here a few, maybe even one, individual has posting rights for a particular area or interest but others submit changes. Maybe even some of the technology might be applicable - genealogy on Github? Finally, can I suggest "collaborative" rather than "collegial"? -- Hotmail is my spam bin. Real address is ianng at austonley org uk