North West family tree website launched

A free specialist website containing valuable information for people researching their families' past has been launched by a University of Manchester historian. The website contains 3000 or so records of small businesses and people with common surnames living between 1760 and 1820, mainly in Manchester and Liverpool. Though small, the database will boost the efforts of some amateur historians to delve into their roots before the 1841 census - a common barrier to investigators. The brainchild of Professor Hannah Barker from The University of Manchester, it is based on court records, wills, business records and family correspondence. Funded by the Economic and Social Research council, historians can search the database by name, business and document. Professor Barker said: "Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century wills and court records are publicly available - but they can be hard to use even for professional historians .They are also often difficult to access. "This database makes the information easily accessible for the first time in the north west." - She felt that data, compiled during her research of small business families in the North West, would be useful for family historians.