Tag Archives: parishes

Geography for Genealogists

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My knowledge of the geography of places where I do genealogy research has come on in leaps and bounds over the years of doing this, and I’m sure it will be the same for most of you too. There are places I’ve never even visited in real life, yet can visualise their location on the map, together with surrounding villages or parishes. When we come across a likely record in an unfamiliar place, we need to assess the probability of this being our person.  Finding the place is a village just two miles from the expected location adds weight to that possibility. It goes without saying that maps, old and new, become our friend, but I thought it would be interesting to think of how ‘geography for genealogists’ differs from the geographical needs of regular people just finding their way from A to B or planning to visit a new area.

Essentially, of course, we need to understand the geography not only as it is today, but also as it was at different periods through history. It’s almost as if we have to peel back the layers to get to the place as it was during our period of interest.

Knowing all the names that apply to a specific place
Historically, our towns and villages have been organised into different administrative levels. We need to know what these are – what they were called, the nature of the administrative level bearing that name, the historical period in which it operated, and why each one is sometimes the place-name used… but not always. It all boils down to different types of record and where they were created. These different types of places and administrative levels include:

  • County
  • Hundred / wapentake / rape
  • Town or village
  • District
  • Parish
  • Diocese
  • Civil Registration District
  • Poor Law Union
  • Manor
  • Another name grouping places together, such as ‘Upper Wharfedale’ or ‘Cinque Ports’, or in Yorkshire the three Ridings.

Some of these are more important as we progress our trees further back; others come into play in the nineteenth century.

I wrote about some of these different administrative levels in a couple of posts back in 2019, and how confusing it can be to find a death recorded in two apparently different places – the parish and the registration district – particularly when neither of these named places is the known abode of the deceased. When we understand the function of all these administrative levels, these apparent ‘discrepancies’ fall into place. Even so, if we’re working with a new, unfamiliar area, we’re likely to have a bit of researching to do before it will all fall into place.

Good sources of information around all this include:

  • The UKBMD website, useful for helping you work out which Registration District your place of interest was in.
  • GENUKI has listings and information about all parishes, arranged by county.
  • FamilySearch Maps enables you to search for the parish on a map, to see other place names within the parish, to locate it in amongst adjacent parishes, and to see what ‘jurisdictions’ it fell within before or as at 1851, including the county, Registration District, diocese, Poor Law Union and others.
  • You’ll find useful information on Wikipedia, for example a search for “high peak district wapentake” returned this page about Hundreds of Derbyshire.
  • Also try FamilySearch Research Wiki, which you can access via the home page → Search → Research Wiki, or you can access simply by Googling “FamilySearch” and the name of a place you’re interested in. Using both methods, I searched for “Staffordshire”, and from there navigated to the parish of Kinver, which has a good selection of historical/geographical information about that parish.
  • The Manorial Documents Register on the National Archives Discovery pages enables you to search for manors by name or within specific parishes.
  • In addition to any old maps you can find, the National Library of Scotland Side by Side maps can really help you to pinpoint and understand where a specific place used to be.
  • A Family History or Local History group’s website is likely to have other relevant information.
  • And of course your search engine of choice.

Historic accent and dialect
An additional feature of ‘genealogical geography’ is that in a time when many people could not read and write, and even before that when rules for spelling were not as established as they are now, place names were written as they sounded, or as the scribe heard them. It can take much poring over online maps to work out what a placename was meant to be, or what we would call it today. It’s easier if you’re familiar with the local accent or dialect. One that had me stumped for years was ‘Aul Court Somersetshire’, recorded as grandfather’s place of origin on a Dade style baptism register in York. If it hadn’t been for a friend who used to live in this long-elusive and mysterious place, I would still not know that this is a reference to the parish of Walcot, today part of Bath. It does give us a bit of extra information though, about the person who gave this place-name to the clerk. She spoke with a Somerset accent with which the York-based clerk was unfamiliar.

Variations in information given about places
Sometimes our ancestors gave different information about key places on different records. Often, we can explain this by distance – and the same would apply today. If I lived in Tedburn St Mary, about 5 miles west of Exeter, and I was talking to someone in Exeter, I would say I lived in Tedburn St Mary. If I moved to Norwich and was asked where I was from, I might say ‘Exeter’. In other circumstances I might say ‘The West Country of England’.

Map showing the area around Hopperton in North Yorkshire, including the villages of Coneythorpe, Cowthorpe, Great Ouseburn and Little Ouseburn.

It would have been just the same for our ancestors who migrated.

However, this doesn’t explain why a person I previously researched gave his place of origin variously as ‘Coneythorpe’, ‘Cowthorpe’, ‘Hopperton’, Ouseburn’ and ‘York’. Even if we accept York as the nearest big place and therefore more likely to be reported to a stranger, it still doesn’t explain why this person gave so many tiny places as his birthplace on different documents.

We have to be prepared to think out of the box!

Some places have disappeared
Sometimes the only geographical indication that a place ever existed is a lane bearing that name, and presumably once leading to it. The only modern day indication of a place of significance to one of my 6x great grandfathers is a Service Station bearing that name. On these occasions we may just have to take what we can and accept that our place of interest is ’round about here somewhere’.

Knowing the lay of the land
Going further back in time, knowledge of other geological features such as mountain ranges could be useful in indicating where networks are unlikely to extend. Conversely, historic places such as abbeys, and the trading routes once linked to them, or the land holdings of important families, might explain why people did turn up in unexpected places.

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Some of the above, of course, applies equally to local history, while the nature of the records we use means that some of the challenges are more prevalent for family historians. I’m sure you’ll be able to think of examples of all this from your own research, and perhaps other aspects of geography that have extra layers when researching our family histories. If you do, please do tell us about it in a comment.

The many historic parishes of Norwich (and other fine cities)

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Years ago, someone told me Norwich had 52 churches (one for each Sunday of the year) and 365 pubs (one for each day of the year).  An interesting fact I probably would have thought no more of, had it not been for discovering my own ancestral roots in that beautiful city.

My 3xG grandfather, Thomas, was from Norwich, and it was there that he met and married my 3xG grandmother (not a local).  They had five children before moving to Yorkshire, where a further nine children would follow.  In the 1861 census their daughter Emily, now in Leeds, gave what at first I considered a strange response to the question about place of birth: ‘Norfolk St Martin Norwich’.  A church…?  Why on earth would she give as her birthplace the name of the church where, presumably, she was baptised?

I suspect some of you will already know the answer – particularly if you have ancestral or other connections to historic towns like Winchester, York and Exeter.  But to me it was a puzzle; and to find the explanation we first have to go back to the 11th century.  It seems towns which developed at that time tend to have many small parishes, while those developing just 100 years later are more likely to have one large parish.

Norwich dates from Saxon times.  At the time of the Norman Conquest it was one of the largest towns in England with a population of over 5,000.  When the city walls were built (1280-1340), enclosing an area a little over one square mile, the population had increased to 10,000 people.  And yet, records show that there were around 58 churches – far more than required to accommodate the worshipping needs of a population that size.  A fascinating map, created using contemporary documents, shows the original churches of Norwich existing during the 13th century or earlier.

This was of course before the English Reformation.  The Church of Rome had taken hold, but the old ways of thinking were not yet forgotten.  This preference for many parishes may be explained by the practice of cults of specific saints, each bringing protection in the event of specific circumstances.  Hence the greater the number of saints venerated, the greater the protection.  Note too, the number of churches dedicated to Anglo Saxon or Celtic saints – e.g. Edmund, Etheldreda and Ethelbert (actually East Anglian), Cuthbert, Swithun.  There is comfort and strength in familiarity.

Those pre-13th century churches are not the same buildings that exist today.  Their present-day counterparts were mostly built in the 15th century.  I’ll say more about them in a later post, but an 1819 map shows that they were built on the same sites and tended to retain the same dedications.  As you can see, as at 1819, only 36 churches are shown.  Several had been demolished in the 16th century.  Prior to that there had at one time or other been as many as 63.  The number of pubs given in that old local saying is inaccurate too: there were, at one time, more than 500.  So, for balance, I give you an 1892 Drinker’s Map!

Of course none of this explains why my 3xG aunt Emily felt the need to record the scene of her baptism on the census.

The answer is all connected with the topic of my last post: the parish.  If I had only known it back then, Emily was flagging up that, at the time of her birth – 1829 – it was the parish that had responsibility for recording the population, and in so doing it exercised not only spiritual but also secular control.  In Norwich, as in Lincoln and York (47 parishes each), Oxford (20 parishes), Exeter (29), Thetford (22), Winchester (57), Canterbury (17) and the City of London (a whopping 126 parishes in the square mile!) it really would have mattered which parish you had been born in, or had in some other way since birth achieved legal ‘settled’ status.  It was the parish where you had settlement rights that had a duty to provide if you fell on hard times.  Even though my 3xG aunt Emily had long since left Norwich, it would have been natural to think of her origins not in the city as a whole but in the Norwich parish of St Martin at Oak.

That list of towns in the paragraph above is not exhaustive.  You may have ancestral ties to another town with a similar parish arrangement; and if so, what follows applies to your research too.

For us as genealogists, there are two points to come out of this:
The first is a bit of a pain.  It was the individual parishes that kept records, and these records are still arranged at county record offices by parish.  Therefore if you find yourself in the local archives looking for 18th century records relating to an ancestor from Norwich, York, Lincoln, Exeter, London, etc you may have to look through many sets of parish records before you find them.  (I do indeed have an ancestor known only to have been born in ‘London, Middlesex’, circa 1816….. horrors!)  Even if you have information, if your ancestor moved around within the city, you may have to look at the records of several parishes.

The second point is much nicer.  Clearly, these parishes covered a very small, if densely populated, geographical area.  In the absence of records with street names and addresses, through these various sets of parish records we can see more or less where our ancestors lived at different stages of their lives.  Hence I can use baptism, marriage and burial records to see that my 4xG grandmother, Hannah, was born in Norwich in St James Pockthorpe, was living in St Peter Mancroft when she married, and thereafter lived in a total of five parishes all within a quarter of a mile of that, eventually dying in the parish of All Saints.

One final point – and maybe it’s just me – but I love the names of these old churches!  They tell us so much about the history of the place, from the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic saints outlined above; to St Mary Unbrent: properly called ‘St Mary in combusto loco’, or ‘in that part of the city burnt in the great fire of 1004’; to St John Maddermarket – one of my favourites, since it refers to the market selling madder and other natural dyestuffs for use in the local production of woollen cloth.

PS. I’ve started a new category with this post: Intermediate genealogy skills, since I think if you get to the stage of researching parish records in the county archives you’ve definitely moved on from Beginner.  Whatever stage you’re at in your family research – happy hunting!