Place:Burtonwood, Lancashire, England

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

source: Family History Library Catalog

the data in this section was found in an article in Wikipedia Burtonwood was the westernmost of the townships or civil parishes that made up Warrington Rural District. It was originally a chapelry in the ancient parish of Warrington, in the West Derby Hundred of Lancashire. In 1974 it became part of Warrington District and is now part of the Warrington Unitary Authority in Cheshire. The current civil parish is named Burtonwood and Westbrook and has its own parish council (some parts of Warrington are unparished). Westbrook (redirected here) is a smaller village within the area of the original township. According to the 2001 census, the population of the entire civil parish was 11,265. Burtonwood was a former RAF Station, usually known as Burtonwood military camp. It was mainly used by the United States Air Force between 1942 and 1958 when the main airfield was closed. It had been one of the largest US airbases in Europe. Burtonwood's population rose from 990 in 1861 to 2,408 in 1911 as the mining and brewing industries grew. In 1951 the parish population leaped to 8,238 including the American air base personnel. This dropped to 4,899 in 1971, but had risen to over 11,000 by 2001 as a result of housing development on the old RAF station site. The village is known for its brewery, which brews the Burtonwood ales. The brewery was founded in 1867, and built up a large estate of pubs. In 1964 Burtonwood Breweries became a public company, but retained its head office in the village.

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 Burtonwood from British History Online (Victoria County Histories), published 1911:*The Wikipedia article on RAF Burtonwood also includes details on the USAF station that shared the site. The article leads to other references.