Those Places Thursday - an early census of Macclesfield

Cheshire is a good county to research from a distance, because there are already so many good online resources for the county. These include tithe maps and apportionments are on the Cheshire Archives and Local Studies  site; you can search and download a number of records from FindMyPast including parish registers and wills; additionally, there are indexes to Land Tax Assessments and school records at FamilySearch.

Now a new free site 1611MacclesfieldSurvey.info provides details of a rare early 'census' in the form of a survey of freeholders and tenants in the Forest and Manor of Macclesfield around 1611. There are 700 names, indexed, and also an address index of 64 house names. There is also a bonus in the form of an Index of Extracts from Escheators Books containing 37 names from much earlier periods, the earliest dating from 1362/63. This will be of interest to local historians, and to family historians who have been lucky enough to trace their ancestors this far back in the Macclesfield area.

These names come from the records of the Office of the Auditors of Land Revenue (Ref LR 2/200) in The National Archives.