Welcome . . .

. . to the Nottingham Elites database, a site designed for historians of every kind who have an interest in recording, analysing and adding to data on the involvement of local people in the affairs of the city and city life.
The database contains information on some 3000 individuals who were actively involved in city institutions and civil society in the first half of the twentieth century. It covers those who stood for civic office as councillors or Poor Law guardians, were magistrates or were involved in one or more of the numerous voluntary associations and charities of that period.

How to Use the Database

The site allows you to search via a variety of categories or subcategories, from an individual’s name, through to broader groupings like political affiliation, membership of a particular voluntary association or charity, or even by profession or profession type. You can search also by date, so that if you wanted to know the names and addresses of Conservative councillors or all councillors in the 1900s, or which people were involved with running Nottingham General Hospital in the 1930s and what they all did for a living, then you can set those parameters via a series of drop boxes. Having found a particular set, you can then plot this on an historical map of the city, to see where these people lived and the types of houses in which they lived (so that you can get a feel for their wealth, standing and status).

Adding to the Database

One of the things particularly we would like to encourage is that users add to the information already collected on individuals and organisations. The quantity of information we have on each varies enormously: for those always in the public eye, data collection was relatively easy, but for those less visible this was much less the case. But we know, too, that there is a wealth of community-based knowledge out there about this, that or the other. So if you can add to what we already know, please do by going to our data collection link.