Are you descended from Sheffield's famous knife makers?

The history of Sheffield is bound up with cutlery and steel

A search is under way to find the descendants of the many families behind the firms that made knives in the steel city of Sheffield.

People can consult a list of knife-makers online and see if they share a surname using a digital archive.

The city's Ken Hawley Collection has about 1,500 stainless steel knives made by almost 1,000 different makers.

The archive wants to discover more about its collection of table knives and the people who made them.

"One thing that stands out is that the makers all have good Sheffield surnames," said volunteer Nick Duggan.

They include Creswick, Gregory, Hawksley and Turner.

"We have six different firms in total with Gregory in the title, for instance," Mr Duggan added.

The project hopes to find 5,000 people from the city whose family names are on the cutlery database.

Sheffield's cutlery manufacturing and silversmithing is renowned (silver table knife, 1897, James Deakin and sons)

"We are finding people with knowledge of the steel industry and some have helped to correct our records.

"We've got knives without a name and firms without a knife," said Mr Duggan, a retired teacher.

A few of the knife-making firms would have employed thousands of workers but others had only two or three, he said.

"Everybody used to have a humble table knife," says Mr Duggan

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The initial idea of the project was to have a wall of knives, similar to names on a war memorial at the Kelham Island Museum.

Now the Heritage Lottery-funded digital archive has brought the idea to a wider audience.

Ken Hawley's tool collection has been amassed since the mid-1950s and has more than 100,000 objects relating to Sheffield's tool, cutlery manufacturing and silversmithing industry.

Cutlery has been made in Sheffield since the 13th Century, long before steel was made there from 1700.

Knife production in Sheffield is not finished yet. The firm of Swann-Morton, for instance, still makes millions of surgical blades every week.

John Derby launched his own business in St Philip's Road as a table cutlery manufacturer in 1864

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