Local historians, especially those of us not working in academia, often ignore quantitative history as it can be more challenging, particularly if you are not comfortable with maths or statistics. But we should be bold; it is all too easy to drift into narrative history, especially when focusing locally. Digging about in the numbers can reveal interesting information and can be the springboard for further investigations. Excel and its open-source alternatives have powerful tools for crunching number and producing charts, and there is plenty of help on the internet, Google is our friend! This blogpost is about using quantitative data to reveal trends and spark further investigations. Back in the 1970s Roger Schofield and Tony Wrigley produced an excellent study of England’s population across the last 500 years using data taken from the parish registers of 404 English parishes. Subsequently, this data was expanded to produce data for baptisms, marriages and burials aggregated ...