Manchester Projects

We don't sit back and wait for somebody else to provide information, we go out and actively seek it both in record offices and from private institutions. We try to involve as many of our members as possible in adding to our impressive collection of locally relevant research material.

Projects are increasingly organised so that members can work from home, transcribing and/or indexing from scanned copies of original archive material. In this way, every member has the opportunity to get involved.

The projects in which the society is currently involved include:

This recent project, in association with Manchester Jewish Museum, will create an index to a number of births and marriages at the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue.

This ongoing project has so far produced a list of over half a million burials in and around Manchester and Oldham.

MLFHS, working with the Salford Diocesan Archive and the Catholic Family History Society, has created one of the most comprehensive indexes to names appearing in Roman Catholic baptism, marriage and burial registers. The index contains the names of over 800,000 persons named in the registers.

The records of Manchester Crematorium were lost in the 1940 Blitz. By using the memorial plaques at the Crematorium, death notices in local newspapers and a variety of other sources, information has been recovered relating to about two-thirds of those cremated up to the end of 1940.

While most of Manchester's memorials are now long since removed, many transcripts were mad before their removal. We have collected these into an unparalleled database of over 600,000 persons named on over 185,000 memorials in Manchester and the surrounding area.

There are plenty of indexes to those who left wills but few which name the executors, witnesses and beneficiaries, so much vital information goes unseen. This project is creating an index to the names appearing in the wills of Manchester residents between (initially) 1812 and 1837.

In a project supported by The Seashell Trust, the modern incarnation of the former Royal Manchester School for the Deaf, we are indexing the surviving admission registers to the school. This will be of value both to family historians and to those investigating the history and genetic aspects of deafness

Initially launched as a part of the commemoration of the centenary of the Great War, this project to record the names appearing on war memorials in Greater Manchester has so far recorded 64,000 names from over 900 memorials, most with photographs of the memorial concerned.

A suitcase-full of letters written during the Great War to one of the teachers at the Zion Institute in Hulme, by servicemen who had been his students was passed on to the society. The project will involve the scanning and transcription of the letters and creation of an index to the names and events mentioned.