The purpose of the present work is to estimate the extent to which elastic stress-strain field of a notch has some contribution to the behaviour of a crack emanated from the notch root . A current work necessitates the analysis of some non-standard notch geometries with no data available in the literature. Two dimensional elastic finite element technique is used for such a study. The states of plane stress and plane strain are analysed. In the present approach a model based on the concept of equivalent cracks applied to the relative movement of the two surfaces of Irwin's elastic crack is suggested Alternatively, and for comparison, stress intensity factors for all cracks analysed are computed by making use of the energy release rate concept .