Place:Bayston Hill, Shropshire, England

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

source: Family History Library Catalog

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

Bayston Hill is a large village and civil parish in central Shropshire, England. It is 3 miles (5 km) south of the county town of Shrewsbury and located on the main A49 road, the Shrewsbury to Hereford road.

Occupied continuously since before the Middle Ages, the village had a population of 5,079 residents in 2,172 households in the 2011 UK census. Bayston Hill now mainly serves as a dormitory village for nearby Shrewsbury. It has the largest population for a village in Shropshire and the 10th highest population of any Shropshire locality.

As explained by Wilson's Gazetteer (see below), Bayston Hill was originally a chapelry which was shared between the ecclesiastical parishes of Condover and Shrewsbury St. Julian. On a map of 1900 Bayston Hill is on the border between the parishes of Condover and Meole Brace (closer to Shrewsbury). In 1935 Meole Brace was absorbed into Condover and Bayston Hill found itself more in the centre of Condover parish (see map of 1944).

Bayston Hill continued as a part of Condover until 1967 when it became a separate civil parish within Atcham Rural District. In 1974 rural districts throughout England were abolished and replaced with new metropolitan districts which combined the rural districts, urban districts, municipal boroughs and county boroughs that existed within their newly drawn geographical borders. The Shrewsbury and Atcham Borough, so created, existed until 2009 when it was replaced by a unitary authority called the Shropshire District which covered the whole of the county with the exception of The Wrekin District (to the east of Shrewsbury and Atcham Borough) which was formed in 1998.

The hamlet of Lyth Hill lies to the south of the village in Condover parish. A busy rope works, complete with its own windmill built in 1835, existed on Lyth Hill in the 19th century, supplying the many mines, farms and barge owners across the district. A church was built alongside the village glebelands in 1843 to serve the local miners, quarrymen and railway navvies.

A Vision of Britain through Time provides the following description of Bayston Hill from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1870-72:

"BAYSTON-HILL, a chapelry in the parishes of Condover and [Shrewsbury] St. Julian, Salop [or Shropshire]]; on the Shrewsbury and Hereford railway, 1 mile N of Condover station, and 3½ S of Shrewsbury. It was constituted in 1844; and it has a post office under Shrewsbury. Population: 605. Houses: 134. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Lichfield. Value: £140.* Patron: the Vicar of St. Julian."

Research Tips

• The historical short form for Shropshire was "Salop". This is quite often found in archive material.
• Shropshire Archives, Castle Gates, Shrewsbury SY1 2AQ
• Shropshire Family History Society.
• The GENUKI main page for Shropshire provides information on various topics covering the whole of the county, and there is also a link to a list of parishes. Under each parish there is a list of the settlements within it and brief description of each. This is a list of pre-1834 ancient or ecclesiastical parishes but there are suggestions as to how to find parishes set up since then.
• GENUKI also provides transcriptions of parish registers for numerous parishes throughout Shropshire. These will be noted at the bottom of this list as time permits for the parishes involved. Each register is preceded by historical notes from the editor-transciber and other details than simply births, marriages and deaths that have been found in the individual books from the parishes. These registers probably only go up to 1812 when the proscribed style for registers across the country was altered.
• GENUKI lists under each parish further references to other organizations who hold genealogical information for the local area. (URLs for these other websites may not be up to date.)
• The FamilyTree Wiki has a series of pages similar to those provided by GENUKI which may have been prepared at a later date and from more recent data. The wiki has a link to English Jurisdictions 1851. There is a list of all the parishes in existence in 1851 with maps indicating their boundaries. The website is very useful for finding the ecclesiastical individual parishes within large cities and towns.
• A Vision of Britain through Time, Shropshire, section "Units and Statistics" leads to analyses of population and organization of the county from about 1800 through 1974. There are similar pages available for all civil parishes, municipal boroughs and other administrative divisions that existed pre-1974. Descriptions provided are usually based on a gazetteer of 1870-72 which often provides brief notes on the economic basis of the settlement and significant occurences through its history.
• The two maps below indicate the boundaries between parishes, etc., but for a more detailed view of a specific area try a map from this selection. The oldest series are very clear at the third magnification offered. Comparing the map details with the GENUKI details for the same area is well worthwhile.

• Map of Shropshire illustrating urban and rural districts in 1900 produced by UK Ordnance Survey and provided online by A Vision of Britain through Time. Parish boundaries and settlements within parishes are shown. (Unfortunately the online copy of this map has pencil codings in each parish which make it difficult to see the orignal.)
• Map of Shropshire urban and rural districts in 1944 produced by UK Ordnance Survey and provided online by A Vision of Britain through Time. Parish boundaries and settlements within parishes are shown. This is not a repeat of the first map. There were a number of changes to urban and rural district structure in the 1930s.

• A map of the ancient divisions named "hundreds" is to be found in A Vision of Britain through Time. Some of the hundreds were broken into separate sections with other hundreds in between.
• The website British History Online provides four volumes of the Victoria County History Series on Shropshire. Volume 2 covers the religious houses of the county; Volume 4 provides a history of agriculture across the county, and Volumes 10 and 11 deal with Munslow Hundred, the Borough of Wenlock and the Telford area (i.e., the northeastern part of the county). The rest of the county is not presently covered. References to individual parishes will be furnished as time permits.