Brief Checklist
Not an exhaustive list; just the basics
Background
Essential background reading :-
Colin Rogers The Surname Detective
David Hey Family Names and Family History
Oxford Companion to Local and Family History
Contemporary distribution
Consult Telephone Directories
Electoral Registers
Survey of Contemporary Names (The distribution of 16,000 names available here)
1881 Census
Extraction from census, manually or with LDS Companion
1851 Census
No National Index; but most Family History Societies have indexed ‘their’ county
GRO data
Births, marriages and deaths by registration district
Hearth Tax
Many counties available in print or will be through the Roehampton program
Poll Tax
The real thing : back almost to the era when heriditary surnames were formed