Place:Chepping Wycombe Rural, Buckinghamshire, England

Watchers
NameChepping Wycombe Rural
Alt namesChepping Wycombesource: parish renamed in 1949
TypeCivil parish
Coordinates51.608°N 0.692°W
Located inBuckinghamshire, England
See alsoFlackwell Heath, Buckinghamshire, Englandvillage within Chepping Wycombe parish
Loudwater, Buckinghamshire, Englandvillage within Chepping Wycombe parish
Tylers Green, Buckinghamshire, Englandvillage within Chepping Wycombe parish
Wycombe Rural, Buckinghamshire, Englandrural district of which Chepping Wycombe was a part 1894-1974
Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, Englandadministrative district which replace Wycombe Rural in 1974


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

Chepping Wycombe is a civil parish in the ceremonial county of Buckinghamshire, England. The parish includes the three large villages of Tylers Green, Loudwater and Flackwell Heath. The central part of the parish comprises extensive business and industrial development lying adjacent and underneath an elevated section of the M40 in the valley of the River Wye.

The name, Chipping derives from the Old English word cieping meaning 'market' or 'market-place'. Historically, Chepping Wycombe (or Chipping Wycombe) was the formal name of the ancient borough and later municipal borough of High Wycombe. It was also the name of the ancient parish which included the borough and extended further than the borough boundary to also cover the surrounding rural area.

The ancient parish of Chepping Wycombe was split in 1866, with the part inside the borough becoming a separate civil parish called "Wycombe" or "Wycombe Borough", leaving the reduced parish of Chepping Wycombe covering the more rural areas outside the borough. Between 1868 and 1880 the parish of Chepping Wycombe was governed by a Local Board of Health. The board was abolished in 1880 when the borough boundaries were extended, notably taking in Wycombe Marsh and other areas from Chepping Wycombe parish. However, the parish boundaries were not changed to match the new borough boundary in 1880, and so the parish of Chepping Wycombe again found itself part inside and part outside the borough. In 1894, when parish councils were introduced under the Local Government Act 1894, the civil parish of Chepping Wycombe was split between the urban area of High Wycombe (Chepping Wycombe Urban parish) and the rural areas outside the borough to the east (Chepping Wycombe Rural parish). The parish was reduced in size in 1901 ceding land to the adjacent High Wycombe parish and its boundaries were further changed in 1934. Chepping Wycombe Rural parish was renamed simply Chepping Wycombe in 1949.

Today the areas which comprised the historic borough and that of the civil parish, (the residual part of the ecclesiastical parish) together with West Wycombe constitute the majority of the present-day High Wycombe Urban Area.

Contents

Research Tips

Registration Offices

Maps

  • An outline map of the current civil parishes of Buckinghamshire (post 1974 and omitting Milton Keynes unitary authority) is provided by the Boundaries Commission.
  • Another map which gives no source, appears to have been drawn to show the county in the late 19th century and labels the parishes directly. However, the map does not show towns and villages (unless they are parishes using the same name) and some parishes have been found to be missing from this map.
  • A map provided by the Open University (a British university based in Milton Keynes) gives the locations of the old civil parishes and the new communities that make up Milton Keynes. It can be expanded to read the labels.

Registration Offices

Birth, marriage and death certificates can now be ordered online from Buckinghamshire County Council. The full postal address is Buckinghamshire Register Office, County Hall, Walton Street, Aylesbury, HP20 1YU.

The Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies (County Hall, Walton Street, Aylesbury, HP20 1UU) holds

  • Church of England and Nonconformist churches including registers of baptism, marriage and burial.
  • Around 35,000 wills proved by the Archdeaconry of Buckingham.
  • County and District Councils (lists of councillors, minutes of meetings, etc).
  • Quarter and Petty Session courts.
  • Landed estates of families including the Aubrey-Fletchers, Hampdens, Carringtons and Fremantles.
  • Historic maps including OS, tithe and inclosure maps
  • A wide range of local history books, some for loan.
  • Pamphlets and articles of local history interest.
  • Local newspapers
  • Computers for access to family history resources like Ancestry and FreeBMD.
  • Published material is listed in the Library Catalogue.
  • Catalogues to some of our manuscript material is available through Access to Archives, part of The National Archives (TNA). Their database contains catalogues describing archives held locally in England and Wales and dating from the eighth century to the present day.

In Buckinghamshire, as with other counties in England and Wales, the location of offices where Births, Marriages and Deaths were registered has altered with other changes in local government. A list of the location of Registration Offices since civil registration began in 1837 has been prepared by GENUKI (Genealogy: United Kingdom and Ireland). The table also gives details of when each Registration Office was in existence. In the case of Buckinghamshire, the same registration offices were used for the censuses since 1851. Buckinghamshire now only has a central registration office at County Hall in Aylesbury, but there are facilities for registering births, marriages and deaths in specific libraries around the county.

Nineteenth Century Local Administration

English Jurisdictions is a webpage provided by FamilySearch which analyses every ecclesiastical parish in England at the year 1851. It provides, with the aid of outline maps, the date at which parish records and bishops transcripts begin, non-conformist denominations with a chapel within the parish, the names of the jurisdictions in charge: county, civil registration district, probate court, diocese, rural deanery, poor law union, hundred, church province; and links to FamilySearch historical records, FamilySearch Catalog and the FamilySearch Wiki. Two limitations: only England, and at the year 1851.

During the 19th century two bodies, the Poor Law Union and the Sanitary District, had responsibility for governmental functions at a level immediately above that covered by the civil parish. In 1894 these were replace by Rural and Urban Districts. These were elected bodies, responsible for setting local property assessments and taxes as well as for carrying out their specified duties. Thses districts continued in operation until 1974. Urban districts for larger municipalities were called "Municipal Boroughs" and had additional powers and obligations.

Poor Law Unions, established nationally in 1834, combined parishes together for the purpose of providing relief for the needy who had no family support. This led to the building of '"union poorhouses" or "workhouses" funded by all the parishes in the union. The geographical boundaries established for the individual Poor Law Unions were employed again when Registration Districts were formed three years later. In 1875 Sanitary Districts were formed to provide services such as clean water supply, sewage systems, street cleaning, and the clearance of slum housing. These also tended to follow the same geographical boundaries, although there were local alterations caused by changes in population distribution.

Online Historical References

  • GENUKI for Buckinghamshire provides a lot of material on the county history from a variety of aspects. The maps of the hundreds are reproduced from 19th century publications and show the topology as well as the locations of the various parishes. There is also a schematic map covering the whole county. GENUKI does not contain much information about the 20th century and beyond.
  • Local History Online provides a list of local historical organizations. Each of these societies and organizations has its own website.
  • The FamilySearch Wiki on Buckinghamshire explains the jurisdictions relating to civil affairs, parishes and probate (wills and testaments) for each parish in the county and also outlines when these jurisdictions were in existence. The data does not cover the post-1974 period.
This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at Chepping Wycombe. 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.