Welcome to the Marsden Page, the one-stop shop for anyone with Marsden ancestors.
The MARSDEN Page is maintained by
John Marsden, of Sale, Cheshire, England to advance the MARSDEN One Name Study for the benefit of genealogical researchers with Marsden ancestors or anyone who simply wishes to learn more about the name, its origins and its distribution.
The MARSDEN Page is the Internet presence of the MARSDEN One-Name Study which is registered with the
Guild of One Name Studies (GOONS) as Number 2359. The page is also listed with SurnameWeb where you will find many links to other one-name web sites.The objectives of the study are:
Marsden Family History News, the newsletter of the MARSDEN One-Name Study, was published three times per year from 1994 to 2002 but has now been discontinued. The content consists of biographical articles, lists of MARSDENs drawn from more unusual sources and news of researchers' activities and research interests. Marsden Family History News is registered with the British Library as serial publication ISSN 1368 1311.
The Marsden Archive contains a vast and increasing collection of MARSDEN references drawn from a wide variety of published and unpublished sources. In addition to records of civil registration, parish registers and census returns (including ALL Marsden references from the LDS 1881 index for England & Wales), there are references drawn from trade directories, local histories, trade, professional and educational lists and many others. I will welcome all contributions and particularly those relating to Marsdens outside the UK for which my records are still pretty limited. These records are increasingly being compiled into databases to aid searching and simplify distribution.
The readers of Marsden Family History News are engaged in several projects to gather Marsden information from a variety of original sources to add to the archive and publish for the benefit of all researchers. These include extraction of Marsdens from the UK civil birth, marriage and death indexes, civil wills from 1858 onwards and the 1841 census for Derbyshire.
Watch out for a new project to compile a database of Marsden Birth, Marriage and Death certificates. This will help you to avoid purchasing unnecessary certificates by putting more information than is contained in the indexes into the public domain. Details were published in MFHN Issue 17 but details are available on the Projects page
The archive contains a considerable quantity of Marsden material which I am anxious to share with researchers. Up to now this has meant checking information from paper copies. As time permits, I am adding new material to these pages and concentrating on items which I think will be of general interest such as probate indexes and other general lists which should appeal to the majority of visitors. I am aware of the predominance of UK information and hope to include more overseas material in future. As items are added, they will appear on the "What's New" page so that whenever you visit The Marsden Page you will be able to quickly check out what has been added since your last visit.
This is by no means the only page where you can find out about Marsdens but so far as I know it is the only one which should be of interest to ALL Marsden researchers. The Links page lists other pages which you may find of interest. Some are commercial such as those relating to Gerry Marsden (remember Gerry & the Pacemakers?) and John Marsden, the noted Australian author. Others are operated by other Marsden researchers. I will be pleased to add your URL to the list if you send me details (see the links page for format) and also will welcome links from your own page to The Marsden Page.
This part of the site is still under construction so not much to look at yet! My plan is to set up a gallery with photographs of Marsdens both from my own family and submitted by other researchers. If you would like me to include one or more of your own photos, please send me either a photographic copy or a file (by disk or e-mail) with a scanned copy. Please do not scan in colour since I will only be mounting black & white images. JPG format is to be preferred but I will reserve the right to reduce the size or resolution to keep the file to a manageable size. I have some playing around to do before I will be happy to open up these pages. Bear with me!
One of the goals of the Marsden one name study is to help those who are researching Marsden families to recognise when someone else is working in the same area and to check whether they have relevant information or might possibly be related. All people researching Marsden families wherever they may come from are encouraged to register their interests for publication in these pages. Because of the possibility of abuse of personal information by some web users, details of submitters' names and addresses are no longer published on this page.
If you want to know more about the MARSDEN One-Name Study than you can find in these pages or if you have Marsden ancestors, I'll always try to find relevant information from the archive and identify other researchers who look like they may be working on the same family. Even if I can't help, if I have your information on file I can always contact you at some future date (2 years is not unknown!) when some new information of interest emerges.
Click HERE to send me an e-mail.
The MARSDEN Page will never be finished. As time permits, I am building new pages which I hope will be of interest and value - with a lot of disk space at my disposal, there is still lots of scope. Let me know if you have any ideas for useful material to be added.
Revised: 29 October 2006