On 28/05/16 01:54, Richard Carruthers via wrote: > 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. Is the MDR particularly relevant? That'll depend on the scope -- specifically your definition of "landed, manorial or gentry", a point on which I'm still unclear. Perhaps my experience is atypical, but for families in the social strata that appear in visitations, which I assume is the class of people we're talking about here, I've not found manorial records to be particularly helpful. They tend to deal with people who held land within the manor, rather than the holders of the manors themselves. That's not to say you shouldn't choose Sussex for your pilot; rather, that I'm not convinced the lack of an MDR is a relevant consideration. > 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. I think it would greatly help us in understanding your proposal if you mocked up a short section of this list, and then amplified on one (or a few) of the entries so we could see what you propose the detailed entries to look like. I would also still like to see how you define "landed, manorial and gentry", as this will have a massive effect the scope of the project. > 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. 1377 seems a good time to break. When you said you wanted to treat the whole period from William I to James II, my first thought was that it was too long a period and needed dividing; my first back-of-an-envelope attempt at dividing the period up looked this this: William I to John (1066-1216) Henry III to Edward III (1216-1377) Richard II to Richard III (1377-1485) Henry VII to Elizabeth (1485-1603) James I to James II (1603-1688) And at first I would suggest limiting yourself to one, or two consecutive periods. If you want to work on the earliest two periods, I suggest sticking only to them until the project is well under way. Personally, though, I think the earlier periods will attract fewer competent participants than the later ones, and for that reason I'd have started with the Tudor period, possibly together with one of the adjacent periods; but maybe you'll prove me wrong. Richard