A Guide to Burke's Landed Gentry

There are many editions of Burke's Landed Gentry (as it is coloquially known). The earliest edition was published in 1833 and the most recent in 2001 - there are nineteen editions in all. Getting your head around these editions and what they cover takes some work, but the Wikipedia entry is a good starting point to orientate yourself. Note that the first edition had a slightly different title and is referred to as the "Commoners" whereas later editions are known as the "Landed Gentry". But generically, the term "Landed Gentry" refers to all editions, including the first.

Hint: You can quickly search for a family name in selected editions of Burke's Landed Gentry using my Reference Work Name Searcher

What's in the Landed Gentry?

In general, the series covers notable landed (i.e. land-owning) but non-peer families of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. The division between countries varies through editions (early editions combined all four countries, some later editions split them separately).

Entries are arranged by surname and will also list the principal property of the family (e.g. Beckett of String Hall). Many families appear in multiple editions, and the details provided may grow or shrink through editions, so one of the main challenges for the researcher is identifying which edition contains the most information.

Reliability

One can presume that the reliability of these reference works improved through time. The impression one gets from the earliest works were that families submitted their own pedigrees and there would have been limited review performed by Burke's, simply by virtue of the very large number of families covered. One can imagine, too, that getting your family "into Burke's" was a mark of social standing that may have resulted in families embellishing their pedigrees to make them more interesting - a case of "wish fulfullment", it has been said. As the new editions were published, it's likely that more careful checking was made on the pedigrees and so as we come towards the present day, the accuracy is likely to be higher. That said, one of the difficulties with this set of works is that family pedigrees appear and disappear through time (as those families' importance waxed and waned). Thus the most recent (more accurate) editions may not cover the families you are researching.

In my own research, I have certainly found inaccuracies, but these have mostly been minor (giving the wrong line of work to someone, for instance) rather than major (giving someone the wrong parents). That said, I have also found cases of the latter. Of course, for old families there are no primary parish records available online, so the only sources of pedigree information are these works, plus further archival material that is only available through physical visits. In some cases, the researcher has to apply their own judgement and logic to determine the most likely correct pedigree, given the available sources.

How to use them

Entries start with the current senior member of the family (usually but not always male), followed by a genealogy descending to the present from a selected ancestor.

Many editions have been digitised and so will pop up when you do standard web searches for names using Google etc (i.e. a simple search for your ancestor's name may pop up results from Google Books or Archive.org. Unfortunately, not all volumes have been digitised, and not all digitised volumes have been OCR'd (which means you can't search the text). This means that you have to do a manual read through the Index for a given edition and see if you can find a match. Frustratingly, early editions frequently had no index. And to make matters worse, they were not in alphabetical order (or indeed any discernible order at all). For those, the only solution is to painfully page through the whole book, looking for a match.

The other thing to note is that families that do have an entry in one edition, may have a longer, or shorter, or no entry in prior or subsequent editions. So if you've struck gold and found your family, make sure to check other editions too because you may find a different version that has much more pedigree information in it. This makes it important to check as many editions as possible, rather than just relying on the first entry you find.

If you have access to burkespeerage.com, you can search for family names and obtain a list of matches, as well as an indication of which edition contains the canonical entry for that family.

Finding editions online

Many older editions are available online: for a full list, see the table below. In general, whilst not every volume of every early edition is available online for free, it is possible to find at least one version that has the required family in it. Early editions were in no apparent order, so finding entries is a painful job of paging through the whole volume, or making use of Google search tools (when the pages have been digitised and OCRd), or using my ReWoNaSe search tool.

All editions had an index, but finding it is not necessarily straightforward and even then, my genealogical work flow means that I flit between families quite frequently, and often forget which families I've found in Landed Gentry and which I haven't even looked for. I recommend keeping a list of all family entries you've found, to avoid the painful job of re-finding them at a later date.

The most recent edition was published in 2001 and was split into various regional volumes: Scotland, York, Wales and the North West and Ireland. For some reason, the rest of England has been ignored; perhaps a dedicated volume is in the works (though it's been nearly 20 years).

The table below lists the copies of the various volumes and editions of Burke's Landed Gentry that I have found online. An alternative list is available at Wikipedia. And of course, the most recent edition is available (for purchase or subscription) from burkespeerage.com.

Edition Dates of Publication Full Title Number of Volumes Notes Online Availability
Original 1833-1835 A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Commoners of Great Britain and Ireland, enjoying Territorial Possessions or High Official Rank, but uninvested with Heritable Honours Three Not in alphabetical order, so see my indices below
New Edition 1843-1849 A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland, a Companion to the Baronetage and Knightage Three Largely identical to the following edition
2nd Edition 1850-1853 A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland comprising particulars of upwards of 100,000 individuals Three Identical to New Edition, but with addition of new pages in the Addenda
3rd Edition 1855-1858 A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland Two A single-volume edition was also published in 1858
4th Edition 1862-1863 A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland Two Later re-published as one volume (1863)
4th Edition revised 1868 A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland ? With Supplement and Corrigenda
  • Not found
5th Edition 1871 A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland Two
5th Edition (reissue) 1875 A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland Two With Supplements & Addenda
6th Edition 1879 A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland Two
6th Edition re-issued 1882 A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland Two
  • Not found
7th Edition 1886 A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland Two
  • Not found
8th Edition 1894 A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland Two
9th Edition 1898 A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland Three The 3rd volume is dedicated to Ireland
10th Edition 1900 A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain ? From now on, Ireland was a separate publication
  • Not found
11th Edition 1906 A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain One
12th Edition 1914 A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain One
13th and subsequent 1914+
  • The remaining editions are still under copyright and so not freely available: the author of the 13th edition (Arthur Winton Thorpe) died in 1952 so copyright will expire in 2022