Society Projects

The Society has been active since its inception in a wide variety of projects designed to improve public access to important genealogical sources through transcription and/or indexing. The material produced as a result of Society projects is made available to members in the Library and in many cases published and available for purchase through our Bookshop. At any given time there may be many projects in progress. The following are some of the more significant ones both completed and still in progress.

The returns for Manchester and Salford, together with Bolton, Oldham and other areas of Lancashire, are being indexed by surname and given name(s). CDs for Bolton, Manchester, Salford , Chorlton and Prestwich/Cheetham have been published bringing this project to a close.

Work is in progress on registers for burials at Manchester Cathedral and several other Manchester churches and chapels. Publication of the first of these is expected during 2006. Indexing of burials in Oldham and vicinity is completed and all have been published on microfiche. Reformatting for publication on CDROM is in progress. Three CDs have already been published.

One of the weaknesses of the excellent Alan Godfrey reprints of old Ordnance Survey maps is the lack of an index to street and place names. Following the success of a street index to the 1848 series covering central Manchester indexes for the 1895-1910 series for the city centre and the southern suburbs have been published. Indexes to other maps are being prepared. An index to the maps for the northern suburbs is planned once the series of maps is completed. The maps and indexes are available from our Bookshop.

Prestwich Asylum opened in 1851 and there are continuous records from that date onwards. We have compiled an index to the admissions covering up to 1901. This can be used to identify many of the inmates in the census returns (in which inmates are identified only by initials) and possibly obtain additional information. This has been published on CDROM.

The Anglo-Scottish FHS is active in abstracting and publishing details of people of Scots birth who appear in the 1851 census returns for many parts of the country. A CDROM containing several thousand individuals has been published.

Manchester has long had a large Irish-born population. The Irish Ancestry Branch is currently abstracting and publishing lists of people of Irish birth who appear in the 1861 census returns for Manchester & Salford. Several volumes have been published in book form and the first four volumes are now available on CDROM.

Records of cremations up to the end of 1940 were destroyed in the blitz. Volunteers have transcribed all of the memorials for deaths between 1892 and 1941and the details have been published on CDROM.  There is also work in progress to transcribe death notices from Manchester newspapers. A searchable index is available in the On-line data section and full transcripts are available in the Member Area.

Working in association with Manchester Police Museum, Society volunteers have compiled an index of policemen who served in the Manchester force during the 19th century. This has been published on CDROM.

United Reformed Church Registers

Our Anglo-Scottish branch is currently indexing the baptismal registers, communicant rolls and other records belonging to several Manchester Scottish Presbyterian churches.

War Memorials

A project to transcribe names from Manchester's War Memorials is currently under consideration.

Large parts of the census returns for 1851 for Manchester & Salford were damaged by water while in storage and have not been available to researchers. By kind permission of The National Archives, a team of volunteers has transcribed details relating to some 180,000 individuals. These transcripts have been published on fiche and the series is being re-published on CDROM. All have now been published except for London Road and Gorton Districts.

The Society is always pleased to hear from people who would like to get involved with project work. If you are interested, in the first instance contact the Project Co-ordinator, Bob Haynes, at Clayton House.