Place:Compton Gifford, Devon, England

:the following text is based on an article in Wikipedia Compton Gifford (#3 on map) is a suburb of Plymouth in the English county of Devon. In 1894 it was designated an urban district, but it lost this status in 1896 and was placed in Plympton St. Mary Rural District. In 1939 it lost its ties with the rural district and was amalgamated into the City of Plymouth. Once a small village, it was developed in the 1930s and now lies between the settlements of Mannamead and Efford (in Egg Buckland parish, #5). There are two parts, Higher and Lower Compton, named after two farms and now distinguished by their respective public houses. Although essentially infill development between older larger areas, Compton is distinctive in character. The area covered by the parish of Compton Gifford parish was part of the ancient division of Devon called Roborough Hundred. It is not "Compton" electoral ward shown on the modern map of Plymouth, but part of Plympton St. Mary in the northeast of the city.

History

The following description from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1870-72 is provided by the website A Vision of Britain Through Time (University of Portsmouth Department of Geography).

"COMPTON-GIFFORD, a tything in Charles-the-Martyr parish, Devon; 1½ mile NNE of Plymouth. It includes the small villages of Compton, Mannamead, Mutley, and Hyde-Park-Terrace, comprising a number of fine residences; and has a post office, of the name of Compton, under Plymouth. Acres: 641. Real property: £5,969; of which £156 are in quarries. Population: 880. Houses: 140. The Plymouth, Stonehouse, and Devonport cemetery, established in 1846, comprising 18 acres, and containing two chapels, both in the decorated style of architecture, one of them with a bell-tower, is here. The new South Devon militia depôt also is here, in Ford Park. The tything has a small chapel of ease; and is a [perpetual] curacy, annexed to the vicarage of Charles-the-Martyr, in the diocese of Exeter."

For more information, see the EN Wikipedia article Compton, Plymouth. A long section on Compton in the 19th century.

Research Tips

(revised Jul 2021)

• Ordnance Survey Map of Devonshire North and Devonshire South are large-scale maps covering the whole of Devon between them. They show the parish boundaries when Rural Districts were still in existence and before the mergers of parishes that took place in 1935 and 1974. When expanded the maps can show many of the small villages and hamlets inside the parishes. These maps are now downloadable for personal use but they can take up a lot of computer memory.
• GENUKI has a selection of maps showing the boundaries of parishes in the 19th century. The contribution from "Know Your Place" on Devon is a huge website yet to be discovered in detail by this contributor.

• Devon has three repositories for hands-on investigation of county records. Each has a website which holds their catalog of registers and other documents.

• the Devon Heritage Centre at Exeter
• the Northern Record Office at Barnstaple
• the Plymouth and West Devon Record Office at Plymouth which is independent of the other two.

• There is, however, a proviso regarding early records for Devon. Exeter was badly hit in a "blitz" during World War II and the City Library, which then held the county archives, was burnt out. About a million books and historic documents went up in smoke. While equivalent records--particularly wills--are quite easy to come by for other English counties, some records for Devon and surrounding counties do not exist.

• Devon Family History Society Mailing address: PO Box 9, Exeter, EX2 6YP, United Kingdom. The society has branches in various parts of the county. It is the largest Family History Society in the United Kingdom. The website has a handy guide to each of the parishes in the county and publishes the registers for each of the Devon dioceses on CDs.

• This is the home page to the GENUKI Devon website. It has been updated since 2015 and includes a lot of useful information on each parish.
• Devon has a Online Parish Clerk (OPC) Project which can be reached through GENUKI. Only about half of the parishes have a volunteer contributing local data. For more information, consult the website, especially the list at the bottom of the homepage.

• The FamilySearch Wiki provides a similar information service to GENUKI. An index of parishes leads to notes and references for each parish.

• Brett Langston's list of Devon Registration Districts and parishes within each registration district from 1837 to the present can indicate where to find details of civil registration entries since the process began in England.

• Magna Britannia, Volume 6 by Daniel Lysons and Samuel Lysons. A general and parochial history of the county. Originally published by T Cadell and W Davies, London, 1822, and placed online by British History Online. This is a volume of more than 500 pages of the history of Devon, parish by parish. It is 100 years older than the Victoria County Histories available for some other counties, but equally thorough in its coverage. Contains information that may have been swept under the carpet in more modern works.

• There is a cornucopia of county resources at Devon Heritage. Topics are: Architecture, Census, Devon County, the Devonshire Regiment, Directory Listings, Education, Genealogy, History, Industry, Parish Records, People, Places, Transportation, War Memorials. There are fascinating resources you would never guess that existed from those topic titles. (NOTE: There may be problems reaching this site. One popular browser provider has put a block on it. This may be temporary, or it may be its similarity in name to the Devon Heritage Centre at Exeter.)
• Users studying the Plymouth area are recommended to check the GENUKI page for Plymouth which is lengthy but recently updated (summer 2015). Two entries under the heading "Genealogy" are:

• Donald Curkeet's Plymouth Devonshire and Surrounding Parishes for Family Genealogy website provides church and churhyard photographs, and information, in some cases including parish register name indexes, for a number of Plymouth area parishes. He provided a very useful sketchmap.
• Plymouth is one of the growing number of places for which the Devon Heritage website provides census or parish register transcriptions, articles, and/or illustrations, etc. (For Plymouth they supply lists on specific events or groups of people at varying dates.)

• The Plymouth Museums Art Galleries website describes the 'Of the Parish' headstone and memorial indexing and photography project with explanations of how to search for names in various indexes provided by a number of local groups. The remains in many of the early cemeteries within Plymouth were transferred to the cemetery in Egg Buckland or Eggbuckland after World War II. Other sections of this website might also be of interest to genealogists searching for ancestors in the Plymouth area.