Place:Egg Buckland, Devon, England

:the following text is based on an article in Wikipedia Egg Buckland (#5 on map) is now recognizes as a suburb of the City of Plymouth in the county of Devon, England. Prior to the Second World War Eggbuckland was a small village in a civil parish of the same name a few miles north of Plymouth in Plympton St. Mary Rural District. In 1939 the parish was split with the southern section absorbed into Plymouth and the northern part remaining as a civil parish in the rural district. During the reconstruction of Plymouth many new suburbs were built and soon a new estate was built within one mile to the southeast of Eggbuckland village. During the 1970s the areas in between and surrounding the old village were all developed and the whole area is now referred to by the name Eggbuckland. The development of the A38 major road just south of Eggbuckland in the 1980s lead to the area becoming very popular with commuters. According to an article in the Encyclopedia of Plymouth (link to WayBack Machine in GENUKI), Egg Buckland was amalgamated into Plymouth from Plympton St. Mary Rural District in 1939. At the same time it was moved from Plympton Registration District to Plymouth Registration District. The Domesday Book of 1086 recorded that this manor of "Bocheland" was held by the King, William of Normandy, but was granted to the Saxon Heche or Ecca, thus the land was known as Heche or "Ecca's Bocheland". This was the site of a Saxon church which was replaced by the present church of St Edward in 1470. Over time the name was corrupted and by 1685 it was "Egg Buckland". By 1902, it was one word - Eggbuckland, although the older usage is still seen and heard around the city. The northern rural part of Egg Buckland was absorbed into Plymouth at sometime between the end of World War II and 1967. No information on the date of this merger has been found.

A Vision of Britain through Time provides the following description of Egg Buckland from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1870-72:

"EGG-BUCKLAND, or Buckland-Egg, a parish in Plympton-St. Mary [registration] district, Devon; on the Dartmoor railway, adjacent to the Tavistock railway, and near the river Plym, 3 miles NNE of Plymonth. It contains Crabtree hamlet, and part of Knackers Knowle village; and its post town is Knackers Knowle, Devon. Acres, with Laira Green: 3,304; of which 100 are water. Real property: £8,933; of which £68 are in quarries, and £36 in railways. Population: 1,348. Houses: 272. The property is much subdivided. Widey Court here was the head-quarters of Prince Maurice during his siege of Plymouth, and was visited by the king. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Exeter. Value: £474. Patron: the Lord Chancellor. The church is ancient: consists of nave, south aisle, and chancel, with a tower; and is in fair condition. Charities, £28."

(Prince Maurice of the Palatinate, along with his more well-known brother, Prince Rupert, were nephews of King Charles I and commanded armies for him during the English Civil War. (Wikipedia))

Efford

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

Efford (anciently "Eppeford", "Elforde", etc.) is an historic manor formerly in the parish of Egg Buckland. Today it has been absorbed into the large, mostly post-World War II, eastern suburb of the city of Plymouth. It stands on high ground above the Laira estuary of the River Plym and provides views over long distances: to the north across Dartmoor, to the east and southeast across the District of South Hams.

Efford Manor was home to the families of Robert Bastard, one of the Devon Domesday Book tenants-in-chief of King William the Conqueror; Roger de Whitleigh (from 1345 until circa 1500); Hals (16th and 17th centuries); Trelawny (from 1680 to 1784); and Clarke (from 1784 till the latter part of the 19th century).

A municipal cemetery for Plymouth city, initially 37 acres, was laid out at Efford from 1904 and opened in 1907. It includes Commonwealth service war graves of both world wars, mass burials of victims of the Plymouth Blitzes of April and May 1941, including those of an air raid shelter disaster at Portland Square, reburials from disused burial grounds at Charles Street Quaker Burial Ground, St Andrew's Church, Plymouth and Charles Church, Plymouth. In 1934 Plymouth's City Crematorium was opened within the cemetery.

Knackers Knowle

Knackers Knowle was a village large enough to have a perpetual curacy and a post office during the 19th century. It appears to have formerly had the name Crownhill and was situated on the border of the parish of Egg Buckland and St. Budeaux. There are references (not articles) in Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales and also in White's Devonshire Directory of 1850 quoted by GENUKI.

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.