Place:Goodshaw, Lancashire, England

source: Family History Library Catalog

the following text is based on an article in Wikipedia

Goodshaw is a hamlet on the edge of the Pennine Hills in England north of the market town of Rawtenstall, Lancashire on the A658 road. It is now a ward of Rossendale, where the population taken at the 2011 UK census was 4,033.

A 19th century description

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

"GOODSHAW, a chapelry in Whalley parish, Lancashire, 2 miles NE of Haslingden [railway] station. It was constituted in 1850; and its post town is Rawtenstall, under Manchester. Rated property: £12,204. Population: 4,808. Houses: 902. The property is much subdivided. There are cotton factories, calico printing works, collieries, and quarries. The living is a [perpetual] curacy in the diocese of Manchester. Value: £150. Patrons: Hulme's Trustees. The church dates from 1530; was rebuilt in 1829; and has an old stone font. There are chapels for Baptists, Wesleyans, and Primitive Methodists, a mechanics' institute, and a national school."

The FamilySearch wiki has the following description:

"Goodshaw (St Mary and All Saints) was created as a chapel of ease by 1699 within the boundaries of Whalley, Lancashire Ancient Parish. It is within the township of Higher Booths in the union of Haslingden, the higher division of the hundred of Blackburn, N. division of the county of Lancaster, 2 miles (N.) from Rawtenstall, and 2½(N. N. E.) from Haslingden. This township is on the road from Manchester to Burnley, and includes the villages of Goodshaw Booth, Goodshaw Fold, Crawshaw Booth, Low Clough, and Sunny Side, all of them within the district of Rossendale. The Wesleyans, Baptists, Primitive Methodists, and Society of Friends have places of worship."

Goodshaw was the ecclesiastical parish for an area which included Crawshaw Booth, Loveclough or Low-Clough and, probably, the extraparochial area of Henheads. The relationship of these settlements one to another is best shown by selecting the parish "Goodshaw, Lancashire" in English Jurisdictions 1851. Note that the parish of Haslingden practically surrounds Goodshaw, and Rawtenstall (which probably had the largest population) is a very small area to the south of Haslingden. It is worth comparing this map to Google Earth.

Throughout the 19th century the civil parish (at least, the parish used for vital registrations and censuses) was called Higher Booths and it is not found on a list of ecclesiastical parishes, except that in the Victoria County History of Lancashire (see below).

Research Tips

• See the Wikipedia articles on parishes and civil parishes for descriptions of this lowest rung of local administration. The original parishes were ecclesiastical (described as ancient parishes), 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.
• An urban district was a type of municipality in existence between 1894 and 1974. They were formed as a middle layer of administration between the county and the civil parish and were used for urban areas usually with populations of under 30,000. Inspecting the archives of a urban 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.
• The terms municipal borough and county borough were adopted in 1835 replacing the historic "boroughs". Municipal boroughs generally had populations between 30,000 and 50,000; while county boroughs usually had populations of over 50,000. County boroughs had local governments independent of the county in which they were located, but municipal boroughs worked in tandem with the county administration. Wikipedia explains these terms in much greater detail.
• 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 map from the OS Series Six-inch England and Wales, 1842-1952 provided online by the National Library of Scotland is very helpful for this area. Many of the cottages from the 19th century still exist and are visible on the "Street View" facility of Google Earth.
• A description of the township of Higher Booths, including Goodshaw from British History Online (Victoria County Histories), published 1911