Frederick Danby Palmer

Frederick Danby Palmer was an English writer best known for documenting the history of Great Yarmouth. His surviving bibliography includes The Tolhouse at Great Yarmouth (1884) and Yarmouth Notes, 1830–1872, published in 1889 and compiled from the Norwich Mercury.

His work has a strong local focus. Rather than writing broad national history, he gathered town records, newspaper extracts, and historical detail to build a picture of public life in Yarmouth across several decades. The prefatory material to Yarmouth Notes places him in Great Yarmouth in December 1889, and later references show he also edited Leaves from the Journal of the late Chas. J. Palmer, F.S.A. in 1892.

Some biographical details are hard to confirm from widely available sources, but records connected with Great Yarmouth identify him as both an author and a solicitor, and one local firm traces its origins to a practice founded by Frederick Danby Palmer in 1861. Even from the limited facts that survive online, he stands out as one of those invaluable local chroniclers whose books keep a town's memory alive.