Domesday Descendants is the second volume of the two-volume Prosopography of Persons Occurring in English Documents 1066-1166, which began with the publication of Domesday People in 1999. Both volumes are intended to be used together, since commentaries in the second volume will often indicate that further information should be sought in the first volume (indicated by the date 1086). Nevertheless, it may not always be possible or convenient, especially in a library situation, to have both volumes available at the same time. Partly for that reason, a revised and updated version of the Bibliography and Abbreviations of the first volume is printed here.

As before, the names of persons occurring in the Prosopography are given in Latin. This second volume is based on a variety of sources which lack the (relatively) regular and distinctive orthography of Domesday Book. Hence the name-forms used here have all been standardized. Look-up tables have been provided which enable the relevant name-form to be quickly identified before the subject is sought in the Prosopography.

Domesday People sought to identify historical persons from a mass of almost 30,000 personal names relating to tenement-holders in 1086. Domesday Descendants identifies persons from a similar mass of names drawn from mostly later administrative records, the Surveys, Pipe Rolls and the Cartae Baronum. A few of the records used, such as the Liber Eliensis, identify persons of the same date as the Domesday Inquest but whose names were not subsequently written into Domesday Book. Persons found in the Lincolnshire Claims attached to the Lincolnshire Domesday are also found here and not in the earlier volume. A principle preoccupation of the continuing research has been the continental provenance or ancestry of each person, whether the descendants of Domesday tenants or the men who acquired English tenures after 1087.

As before, Domesday Descendants is not a handlist of all the names occurring in the sources, but a list of all the persons who have been identified from that mass of names and for whom some sort of commentary has been provided (of a total of 11,970 persons identified, 2,436 have not yet been provided with commentaries and so are not listed in either volume). The commentaries on each person are not intended to be fully biographical.