Tools

Brief Checklist

Not an exhaustive list; just the basics

Background

Essential background reading :-
Colin Rogers The Surname Detective
David Hey Family Names and Family History
Oxford Companion to Local and Family History

Contemporary distribution

Consult Telephone Directories
Electoral Registers
Survey of Contemporary Names (The distribution of 16,000 names available here)

1881 Census

Extraction from census, manually or with LDS Companion

1851 Census

No National Index; but most Family History Societies have indexed ‘their’ county

GRO data

Births, marriages and deaths by registration district

Hearth Tax

Many counties available in print or will be through the Roehampton program

Poll Tax

The real thing : back almost to the era when heriditary surnames were formed