The Margaret Higgins Database

The Margaret Higgins Database of Catholics in England and their friends 1607 to 1840, an invaluable resource for those researching Catholic ancestors, was compiled by Br. Rory Higgins and named in memory of his mother. This impressive database contains well in excess of a quarter of a million references to people known, or believed to be practicing Catholics.

The content is drawn from a very wide variety of sources with by far the greatest number (almost 50 thousand) from the 1767 Returns of Papists as published by the Catholic Record Society. Other entries are taken from both published records and from original documents in The National Archives and in other archives throughout the country.

The database is available as a free download for academic and personal research use only. It is presented as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, so users will require a spreadsheet program capable of reading the .xlsx file format.

Users are also encouraged to download and read Br. Rory's lengthy and informative introduction to the database which also provides a key to the abbreviations used in the database and an extensive list of relevant research resources for research into Catholics before 1837.