A detective story with lots of helpful clues

The study of Stoney Middleton genealogy is also a detective story.

One must put together: parish register entries that start for Stoney in the early 1700s (the Stoney Middleton parish register is available (albeit with a few omissions) in a searchable CD-ROM compiled by Mrs. Valerie and the late Mr. Ivor Neal, and the originals are in the Derbyshire Record Office in Matlock–bishops transcripts of the registers go back to the 1660s and are available at the Lichfield Record Office (the Neals include the bishops transcript entries in their CD as well), and both the registers and the bishops’ transcripts have been microfilmed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS, or Mormons) and can be ordered for viewing through the LDS’s family history centres world-wide).

Memorial inscriptions on gravestones in the Stoney Middleton cemetery and in the churchyard of the octagonal church of St. Martin (transcriptions of which have been summarized by the Derbyshire Family History Society and a number of which are quoted on websites); old wills and estate administrations (the originals of which are kept in the Lichfield Record Office in Staffordshire if before the 1858 and thereafter at the Derbyshire Record Office in Matlock and at First Avenue House in London); property, business, and poor law documents (often only available from living Stoney Middleton descendants’ personal caches of memorabilia, though some are at the Derbyshire Record Office in Matlock).

For more recent eras, civil registrations of births, marriages, deaths  (indices of which are available online for free  at freeBMB, and copies of which can be ordered from the General Register Office), as well as available UK census returns (currently searchable from 1841 through 1911, available on Ancestry.com, and other for-pay websites, and the 1881 UK census is available for free on the LDS Church’s genealogy website www.familysearch.org) together with personal 20th century family stories and memoirs, in order to piece together the at-times convoluted and confusing histories of Stoney Middleton families.