Place:Birkenhead, Cheshire, England

Watchers
NameBirkenhead
TypeBorough (county)
Coordinates53.4°N 3.033°W
Located inCheshire, England     ( - 1974)
See alsoWirral Hundred, Cheshire, Englandhundred in which it was situated
Birkenhead Registration District, Cheshire, Englandregistration district of which it was part 1837-1871
Wirral (metropolitan borough), Merseyside, Englandmetropolitan borough of which it has been part since 1974
the following text is based on an article in Wikipedia

Until 1974, Birkenhead was a county borough in Cheshire on the Wirral Peninsula, along the west bank of the River Mersey, opposite the City of Liverpool. It is now a town within the Metropolitan Borough of Wirral in Merseyside, England. At the 2001 UK Census, the town had a population of over 83,500. Birkenhead is perhaps best known as a centre for ship building, as a seaport and its related industries.

Governance

The Cheshire borough of Birkenhead originated as a township in ancient parish of Bidston in the Wirral Hundred of Cheshire. It was incorporated as a municipal borough within the county of Cheshire in 1877, and became a county borough with the passing of the Local Government Act 1888.
The borough originally included

Further townships were added in 1928 and 1933:

On 1 April 1974, Birkenhead and the rest of the Wirral Peninsula, was transferred to the Metropolitan Borough of Wirral, in the newly established metropolitan county of Merseyside. The implementation of the Local Government Act 1972 caused Birkenhead to lose its county borough status. It still remains the largest conurbation within the Wirral.

History

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Medieval period

The earliest records state that the Mersey ferry began operating from Birkenhead in 1150, when Benedictine monks under the leadership of Hamon de Mascy built a priory there. The priory was visited in 1275 and 1277 by Edward I. In a royal charter of 13 April 1330, Edward III granted the priory further rights.

19th century

Distanced from the Industrial Revolution in Liverpool by the physical barrier of the River Mersey, Birkenhead retained its agricultural status until the advent of steam ferry services. In 1817 a steam ferry service started from Liverpool to Tranmere and in 1822 the paddle steamer, Royal Mail, began operation between Liverpool and Woodside.

Shipbuilding started in 1829. An iron works was initially established by William Laird in 1824 and was joined by his son John Laird in 1828. The business eventually became Cammell Laird. Notable naval vessels built at Birkenhead include HMS Achilles, , , , , , , the pioneer submarine , (which sank in Liverpool Bay during sea trials, and was refloated and commissioned as HMS Thunderbolt, only to be lost to enemy action with the loss of the entire crew), and . Merchant vessels were also built such as and .

In 1833 an act was passed to introduce street paving, lighting and other improvements in the town. These included establishing a market and regulating the police force.

The Mersey Railway tunnel opened in 1886, providing direct railway access to Liverpool.

20th century

The Grange Road West drill hall was completed in 1900.

In September 1932 thousands of unemployed people protested in a series of demonstrations organised by the local branch of the National Unemployed Workers Movement. After three days of rioting, police were brought in from elsewhere to help quell the rioters.

In addition to the ferries and the railway, the Queensway road tunnel opened in 1934 and gave rapid access to Liverpool. This opened up the Wirral Peninsula for development, and prompted further growth of Birkenhead as an industrial centre. Bolstered by migration from rural Cheshire, southern Ireland and Wales, the town's population had grown from 110 in 1801 to 110,912 one hundred years later and stood at 142,501 by 1951.

Birkenhead was struck by an F0/T1 tornado on 23 November 1981, as part of the record-breaking nationwide tornado outbreak on that day.

Industry

the following text is based on an article in Wikipedia

Shipbuilding and ship repair still feature prominently in the local economy. The long-standing firm of Cammell Laird entered receivership in 2001. The shipyard was sold and became 'Northwestern Shiprepairers & Shipbuilders', which grew into a successful business specialising in ship repair and conversion, including maintenance contracts for the Royal Fleet Auxiliary. In September 2007 NS&S acquired the rights to use the Cammell Laird name.

Churches

As well as Birkenhead St. Mary which became the civil parish, Birkenhead had a number of other churches which produced birth, marriage and death registers. The names of the churches are as follows:

Birkenhead St Mary
Birkenhead Holy Trinity
Birkenhead St John
Birkenhead St Paul
Birkenhead St Peter
Birkenhead St James
Birkenhead St Bede
Birkenhead St Matthew
Birkenhead St Mark
Birkenhead St Mary and St Paul
Birkenhead St Pater with St Matthew
Birkenhead St James with St Bede

Research Tips

Definitions

  • 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 and his bishop. 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 that never became independent civil parishes, 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.
  • Registration districts were responsible for civil registration or vital statistics and census records. The boundaries of these districts were revised from time to time depending on population density and local government organization. To ascertain the registration district to which a parish belonged in the timeframe in question, see Registration Districts in Cheshire, part of the UK_BMD website.

Helpful Sources

  • Cheshire Archives and Local Studies are the local keepers of historical material for the county. But archives for places that were absorbed into Greater Manchester and Merseyside in 1974 may have been moved to the archive centres for the metropolitan county concerned.
  • FamilySearch Cheshire 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).
  • The GENUKI pages on Cheshire and its parishes point to many other sources of information on places within the county. The many small parishes and townships that existed before 1866 are treated individually as well as the larger towns and conurbations. The GENUKI pages for individual parishes now include a map of the parish and its surrounding area.
  • A Vision of Britain through Time also has summaries and lists of statistics for each parish, but its organization is not for the beginning family historian in a hurry.
  • The pay websites Ancestry and FindMyPast have a number of county-wide collections of censuses, Church of England baptisms, marriages and burials (some from the 1500s), and some providing microfilm copies of the manuscript entries. An international subscription is necessary to access Ancestry's UK holdings.
  • A book entitled The history of the county palatine and city of Chester with the subtitle "compiled from original evidences in public offices, the Harleian and Cottonian mss., parochial registers, private muniments, unpublished ms. collections of successive Cheshire antiquaries, and a personal survey of every township in the county, incorporated with a re-publication of King's Vale royal and Leycester's Cheshire antiquities" by George Ormerod and others was published in 1819. It has been quoted by WR users interested in families traced before 1600. It is available online as images of the original pages at the Open Library (Google Books) as Vol I, Vol II and Vol III.
  • Unfortunately, the Institute of Historical Research only includes two volumes of the Victoria County History for Cheshire on their website and these only cover the City of Chester. There may be other volumes to this series in print, but a Google Search does not indicate any further volumes online.

Maps

  • Cheshire Archives and Local Studies have organized a facility to compare tithe maps circa 1830 and 19th century Ordnance Survey maps with the modern Ordnance Survey. These are available for every civil parish. A knob in the centre of the screen allows the user to move back and forth between the old and the new view. Use the key on the left to show other possibilities including land ownership.
  • The diagrammatical map of Sanitary Districts in Cheshire showing Civil Parishes 1888 produced by the Ordnance Survey and provided by A Vision of Britain through Time is helpful. "Sanitary Districts" were the predecessors of rural districts and usually followed the same boundaries.
  • The Ordnance Survey map of Cheshire circa 1900 supplied by A Vision of Britain through Time shows invidual settlements as well as parishes. There were significant administrative changes in the decade 1890-1900 that have led to some civil parishes absorbed into adjacent urban districts being omitted from this map.
  • A Vision of Britain through Time provides a series of maps from the Ordnance Survey illustrating the towns and villages of Cheshire and also the borders between parishes. The following group of maps provide views of the county at various dates, illustrating the changes in administrative structure.
  • For a close-up view of an area as it looked in the 19th century, try the National Library of Scotland provision. The maps include the Ordnance Survey (OS) 25-inch to the mile series for England and Wales for the period 1841-1952. Country estates and factory buildings on the edge of towns are labelled; roads, railways, rivers and canals are shown.
This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at Birkenhead. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with WeRelate, the content of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.