Norfolk: Genealogical and Historical Projects

This page is to encourage projects about Norfolk, or more general projects in which Norfolk is a significant part. The theme should be genealogical (such as name indexes) or historical (such as village research).

Collecting information, and making it available to fellow researchers, is greatly appreciated by people who do not have access to the sources. It does not have to involve a great deal of effort ! For example, if you have a booklet about a village, you could extract the surnames from it, which will help people tracing their families there.

Below are descriptions of existing projects. If you can help, please contact the person shown with each project's description.

If you would like a project of your own to be included here, please contact me, giving details. Examples could be village studies, transcriptions, extractions of data from published and unpublished sources, creating indexes of names or occupations, population movement, etc. I do not want to include one-name studies or surname research, as these are already covered by mailing lists and web pages.

It is intended that information gathered as a result of a project being on this web page, will be made freely available to fellow researchers (eg via web pages or individual lookups), though a charge to cover costs is acceptable. If this is not the case, then the conditions of future access must be clearly stated.

The Norfolk Lookups page shows topics currently available for lookup requests.

Note that this list is not meant to be in competition with all the work being done by the Norfolk FHS, Mid-Norfolk FHS, etc, and that projects being undertaken by members of the societies may also be included here.

FreeCEN: Census Transcriptions

FreeCEN is a project to transcribe the UK census returns, and put them online in a free searchable database. It needs volunteers for Norfolk, to do transcribing and checking. See the FreeCEN web pages.

Contact Bev Howlett via the Norfolk Information page.

FreeREG: Baptism, Marriage and Burial Transcriptions

FreeREG is a project to transcribe the baptism, marriage and burial records from parish and non-conformist registers in the UK, and put them online in a free searchable database. It needs volunteers for Norfolk, to do transcribing and checking. See the FreeREG web pages.

Contact Kirk Dawson

Pubs, Inns and Taverns and their Keepers in England 1801-1900

This project is to create a searchable database, from a variety of sources, such as trade directories, people's own research, assize records, etc. It will cover all of England in the 19th century.

The information needed is as follows:

Year(s)
(that the information provided relates to)
Name of Premises
Name of Licencee
(As fully as possible. Note - we only need to know about a spouse if they took over the licence on the death of the other)
Location
(Essential: City/town/village and County
If possible: Street address)
Source
(If a printed source, as much detail as possible.
If private, either an e-mail address will be entered where available, or an index number relating to an address in our records to which we will forward the query)

See the PubsIndex Web Pages.

Indexing Parish Histories

Published parish histories (books and pamphlets) usually include the names of many people - but these names may not be indexed. If you have a parish history, making a name index will be of great value to fellow researchers, and may lead to your making contact with people researching ancestors from the same parishes. For an example, see Stoke Ferry.

If a book already has a name index, then it cannot be put on the web, as that would break copyright. Actually creating such an index, though, is permissible.

A possible format for the index could be:
Surname, Forenames, Date, Page
but this will of course depend on the book itself.

Contact Pat Newby

Extracting Names from Directories

Directories such as White's and Kelly's include the names of many of the town and village officials. Extracting the names of all people following one occupation makes a useful resource. For an example, see the list of Sextons and Vergers from Kelly's 1900 Directory.

Contact Pat Newby