Place:Breckles, Norfolk, England

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

source: Family History Library Catalog

A Vision of Britain through Time provides the following description of Breckles from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1871-72:

"BRECKLES, a parish in Wayland [registration] district, Norfolk; 44 miles N by W of Harling Road [railway] station, and 5 SSE ½ of Watton. Post Town: Hockham, under Thetford. Acres: 1,860. Real property: £1,330. Population: 130. Houses: 30. The property is all in one estate.

"The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Norwich. Value: £45. Patron: Sir. E. Kerrison, Bart. The church was restored in 1862. There is a national school."

(The distance from Harling Road station is probably a typo. The text from the gazetteer was scanned and reproduced from the scan. It is probably closer to 4 miles.)

Breckles was an ecclesiastical parish in Wayland Hundred and became a civil parish in the 19th century. It was part of Wayland Rural District from 1894 until 1935 when it was abolished as a civil parish and absorbed into the parish of Stow Bedon. The area is now part of the Breckland District. (Source: A Vision of Britain through Time

Research Tips

• GENUKI provides a list of references for Breckles. Some entries lead to free online transcriptions of registers and censuses.
• GENUKI also supplies a map illustrating the individual parishes of Shropham Hundred. Parishes labelled with letters should be identifiable from the Ordnance Survey Map of 1900.
• GENUKI also advises that the following lists for Norfolk are to be found in FamilySearch:

• England, Norfolk, Parish Registers (County Record Office), 1510-1997
• England, Norfolk Archdeacon's Transcripts, 1600-1812
• England, Norfolk Bishop's Transcripts, 1685-1941
• England, Norfolk Marriage Bonds, 1557-1915
• England, Norfolk Non-conformist Records, 1613-1901

• Ancestry.co.uk has the following lists as of 2018 (UK or worldwide Ancestry membership or library access required). With the exception of the index to wills these files are browsible images of the original documents. The files are separated by type and broken down into time periods (i.e., "Baptism, Marriages, and Burials, 1535-1812" is more than one file). The general explanatory notes are worth reading for those unfamiliar with English parish records.

• Index to wills proved in the Consistory Court of Norwich : and now preserved in the District Probate Registry at Norwich
• Norfolk, England, Bishop's Transcripts, 1579-1935
• Norfolk, England, Church of England Baptism, Marriages, and Burials, 1535-1812
• Norfolk, England, Church of England Births and Baptisms, 1813-1915
• Norfolk, England, Church of England Deaths and Burials, 1813-1990
• Norfolk, England, Church of England Marriages and Banns, 1754-1940

• FindMyPast is another pay site with large collection of parish records. As of October 2018 they had 20 types of Norfolk records available to browse including Land Tax Records and Electoral Registers.