The Peerage

http://www.thepeerage.com/index.htm

New Zealander Darryl Lundy has built a massive website based on the English peerage, which of course relates heavily to the noble and royal families of Europe. An ongoing and ever-changing project, it is of vast importance and use to genealogists from all over the world.

It is best accessed from the various menus. I constantly check at the New entries page, which shows all or most of the names uploaded since the last update. Click on Surnames, and you then find an alphabet. Click on the letter you want, and a complete list of names with the numbers of entries appears. Note that women are indexed under both their married and maiden names.

The site has a discussion group, an index to places and some custom indexes. Not all of the information for each entry is complete, but it is updated promptly when someone in the database dies, remarries or has a child. If you find a mistake, you can email Darryl and not only does he answer, but it gets corrected. In fact he asks for help with corrections.

As a free genealogy site, this is terrific. I can recommend it to anyone with an interest in the English/European nobility. No site is without its faults, and there are a few, but there is such a wealth of information, you just can't go past it.

Patrice Connelly
November 2010, updated August 2011