Place:Bickerstaffe, Lancashire, England

the following text is a condensation of an article in Wikipedia Bickerstaffe has been since 1974 a village and civil parish in the West Lancashire District of Lancashire, England. According to the 2001 Census the population of the civil parish was 1,196, although the population of the electoral ward was slightly greater at 2,013. The village is near junction 3 of the M58 motorway, and is about four miles west of Skelmersdale. Between 1894 and 1974 Bickerstaffe had been a civil parish in West Lancashire Rural District. Prior to that it had been part of the parish of Ormskirk. In the seventeenth century, Bickerstaffe was an important local centre of the Quakers in West Lancashire. A Vision of Britain through Time provides the following description of Bickerstaffe from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1870-72: "BICKERSTAFFE, a township-chapelry. and a subdistrict in the district of Ormskirk, Lancashire. The chapelry is in Ormskirk parish; lies on the Ormskirk and St. Helen's railway, near Blague-Gate station, 3½ miles SE of Ormskirk; was constituted in 1843; and has a post office under Ormskirk. Acres: 6,353. Real property: £10,733; of which £1,320 are in mines. Population: 1,637. Houses: 289. The property is divided among a few. The township gives the title of Baron to the Earl of Derby. Many of the inhabitants are colliers. The living is a [perpetual] curacy in the diocese of Chester. Value, £150.* Patron, the Earl of Derby. The church is good. The subdistrict includes also two other townships and two other parishes. Acres: 11,335. Population: 2,826. Houses: 485"

Research Tips

• See the Wikipedia articles on parishes and civil parishes for descriptions of this lowest rung of local administration. The original parishes (known as ancient parishes) were ecclesiastical, under the jurisdiction of the local priest. A parish covered a specific geographical area and was sometimes equivalent to that of a manor. Sometimes, in the case of very large rural parishes, there were chapelries where a "chapel of ease" allowed parishioners to worship closer to their homes. In the 19th century the term civil parish was adopted to define parishes with a secular form of local government. In WeRelate both civil and ecclesiastical parishes are included in the type of place called a "parish". Smaller places within parishes, such as chapelries and hamlets, have been redirected into the parish in which they are located. The names of these smaller places are italicized within the text.
• Rural districts were groups of geographically close civil parishes in existence between 1894 and 1974. They were formed as a middle layer of administration between the county and the civil parish. Inspecting the archives of a rural district will not be of much help to the genealogist or family historian, unless there is need to study land records in depth.
• Civil registration or vital statistics and census records will be found within registration districts. To ascertain the registration district to which a parish belongs, see Registration Districts in Lancashire, part of the UK_BMD website.
• Lancashire Online Parish Clerks provide free online information from the various parishes, along with other data of value to family and local historians conducting research in the County of Lancashire.
• FamilySearch Lancashire Research Wiki provides a good overview of the county and also articles on most of the individual parishes (very small or short-lived ones may have been missed).
• Ancestry (international subscription necessary) has a number of county-wide collections of Church of England baptisms, marriages and burials, some from the 1500s, and some providing microfilm copies of the manuscript entries. There are specific collections for Liverpool (including Catholic baptisms and marriages) and for Manchester. Their databases now include electoral registers 1832-1935. Another pay site is FindMyPast.
• A map of Lancashire circa 1888 supplied by A Vision of Britain through Time includes the boundaries between the parishes and shows the hamlets within them.
• A map of Lancashire circa 1954 supplied by A Vision of Britain through Time is a similar map for a later timeframe.
• GENUKI provides a website covering many sources of genealogical information for Lancashire. The organization is gradually updating the website and the volunteer organizers may not have yet picked up all the changes that have come with improving technology.
• The Victoria County History for Lancashire, provided by British History Online, covers the whole of the county in six volumes (the seventh available volume [numbered Vol 2] covers religious institutions). The county is separated into its original hundreds and the volumes were first published between 1907 and 1914. Most parishes within each hundred are covered in detail. Maps within the text can contain historical information not available elsewhere.
• A description of the township of Bickerstaffe from British History Online (Victoria County Histories), published 1911