Place:Darcy Lever, Lancashire, England

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia The parish of Darcy Lever (#5 on map) is located on the B6209 (Radcliffe Road), between the town of Bolton and the nearest settlement of any size, Little Lever. Its history dates to the time of William the Conqueror when it was part of the |Salford Hundred and given to Roger of Poitou for services rendered at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Darcy Lever was a township in the ancient or ecclesiastical parish of Bolton le Moors in Lancashire. In 1837 it became part of the Bolton Poor Law Union and became a separate civil parish in 1866. Darcy Lever was incorporated into the County Borough of Bolton following the Bolton, Turton, and Westhoughton Extension Act of 1898. Since 1974 it has been part of the Metropolitan Borough of Bolton in the newly formed county of Greater Manchester, England.

For more information, see the EN Wikipedia article Darcy Lever. Details of the ownership of the manor through the centuries and the development of coal-mining in the area. The built-up part of Darcy Lever appears to be Leverbridge (redirected here).

Leverbridge

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).

"LEVERBRIDGE, a chapelry in Bolton-le-Moors parish, Lancashire; on the river Croal, the Bolton and Bury railway, and the Bolton and Manchester canal, 1½ mile E by S of Bolton [railway] station. It comprises the township of Darcy-Lever, and part of the township of Haulgh; and was constituted in 1844. Post town: Bolton. Rated property: £9,497. Population: 2,844. Houses: 559.

"Most of the land belongs to the Earl of Bradford, Capt. Oats, and Mr. Bradshaw. Darcy-Lever Hall is the seat of W. Gray, Esq.; Darcy-Lever Old Hall, of W. Horridge, Esq.; and Snow-Hill, of E. Barlow, Esq. There are several collieries and cotton mills. A magnificent viaduct takes the Bolton and Bury railway over the valley; and a three-arched aqueduct takes the Bolton and Manchester canal across the river.

"The living is a [perpetual] curacy in the diocese of Manchester. Value: £210. Patron: alternately the Crown and the Bishop. The church was built in 1844, at a cost of upwards of £3,000, on a site given by the Earl of Bradford; and is a cruciform structure of terracotta, in the decorated English style, with tower and spire. There are a Wesleyan chapel, a national school, and charities £35."

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 townships of Darcy Lever and Little Lever from British History Online (Victoria County Histories), published 1911