Place:Great Budworth, Cheshire, England

Great Budworth ancient parish

The ancient parish was situated in the Hundred of Bucklow and deanery of Frodsham. At 15 miles (24 km) in length and 10 miles (16 km) in width, it was considered to be the largest parish in Cheshire except Prestbury. The parish originally contained 34 townships spread over three hundreds: Bucklow, Eddisbury, and Northwich:

Map No.	Township Name	Hundred	Notes
1	Allostock	Northwich
2	Anderton	Bucklow
3	Antrobus	Bucklow
4	Appleton cum Hull	Bucklow
5	Aston juxta Budworth	Bucklow
6	Barnton	Bucklow	chapelry
7	Barterton, or Bartington	Bucklow	1936 to Dutton
8	Birches	Northwich	1892 to Lach Dennis
9	Castle Northwich	Northwich
10	Cogshall	Bucklow	1936 to Comberbach
11	Comberbach	Bucklow
12	Crowley	Bucklow	1936 to Antrobus
13	Dutton	Bucklow
14	Great Budworth	Northwich
15	Hartford	Eddisbury	1894 part to Northwich
16	Higher Whitley or Whitley Superior	Bucklow	1936 merged into Whitley
17	Hulse	Northwich	1892 to Lach Dennis
18	Lach Dennis	Northwich
19	Little Leigh	Bucklow
20	Lostock Gralam	Northwich
21	Lower Whitley or Whitley Inferior	Bucklow	1936 merged into Whitley
22	Marbury	Bucklow
23	Marston	Bucklow
24	Nether Peover	Northwich	chapelry
25	Northwich	Northwich
26	Peover Inferior	Bucklow
27	Pickmere	Bucklow
28	Plumley	Bucklow
29	Sevenoaks	Bucklow	1936 to Antrobus
30	Stretton (near Warrington)	Bucklow
31	Tabley Inferior or Nether Tabley	Bucklow
32	Wincham	Bucklow
33	Winnington	Eddisbury	1936 split between Northwich, Hartford and Weaverham
34	Witton cum Twambrooks	Northwich	1894 absorbed into Northwich

During the reign of Henry III, Sir Geoffrey de Dutton (sometimes "Geffrey de Budworth") (d. 1248) was lord of the manor. De Budworth was the son of Adam, a younger son of Hugh de Dutton. Peter, grandson of De Budworth and ancestor of Sir Peter Warburton, second Bart. of Arley, moved to Warburton, assumed that name, and was a proprietor of Great Budworth. De Budworth gave a third of his land, including St Mary and All Saints Church, to Norton Priory to secure perpetual masses for his soul. After the dissolution of the monasteries, King Henry VIII granted the estate to John Grimsditch. It was afterwards divided into several parcels.

There may have been a school in Great Budworth as early as 1563, but certainly one existed by 1578. For centuries, the village was owned by the head of Arley Hall who would collect rent from the villagers. Rowland Egerton-Warburton of Arley Hall paid for restorations and improvements to the church in the 1850s. Egerton-Warburton also undertook a "campaign to render it (the village) picturesque in Victorian eyes". To this end he commissioned architects including William Nesfield and John Douglas to work on buildings in the village.

end of Wikipedia contribution

Great Budworth civil parish

the following text is based on an article in Wikipedia

Great Budworth is a civil parish and village, approximately 4 miles (6.4 km) north of Northwich, England, within the unitary authority of Cheshire West and Chester in Cheshire, England. It lies off the A559 road, east of Comberbach, northwest of Higher Marston and southeast of Budworth Heath. Until 1948, Great Budworth was part of the Arley Hall estate.

GENUKI states:
Great Budworth was a township in Great Budworth ancient parish in Bucklow Hundred, which became a civil parish in 1866. It includes the hamlets of Belmont, Brownslow and Budworth Heath. The population was 463 in 1801, 643 in 1851, 476 in 1901, 412 in 1951, and 373 in 2001.

Research Tips

Definitions

• 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 and his bishop. 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 that never became independent civil parishes, 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.
• Registration districts were responsible for civil registration or vital statistics and census records. The boundaries of these districts were revised from time to time depending on population density and local government organization. To ascertain the registration district to which a parish belonged in the timeframe in question, see Registration Districts in Cheshire, part of the UK_BMD website.

Helpful Sources

• Cheshire Archives and Local Studies are the local keepers of historical material for the county. But archives for places that were absorbed into Greater Manchester and Merseyside in 1974 may have been moved to the archive centres for the metropolitan county concerned.
• FamilySearch Cheshire 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).
• The GENUKI pages on Cheshire and its parishes point to many other sources of information on places within the county. The many small parishes and townships that existed before 1866 are treated individually as well as the larger towns and conurbations. The GENUKI pages for individual parishes now include a map of the parish and its surrounding area.
• A Vision of Britain through Time also has summaries and lists of statistics for each parish, but its organization is not for the beginning family historian in a hurry.
• The pay websites Ancestry and FindMyPast have a number of county-wide collections of censuses, Church of England baptisms, marriages and burials (some from the 1500s), and some providing microfilm copies of the manuscript entries. An international subscription is necessary to access Ancestry's UK holdings.
• A book entitled The history of the county palatine and city of Chester with the subtitle "compiled from original evidences in public offices, the Harleian and Cottonian mss., parochial registers, private muniments, unpublished ms. collections of successive Cheshire antiquaries, and a personal survey of every township in the county, incorporated with a re-publication of King's Vale royal and Leycester's Cheshire antiquities" by George Ormerod and others was published in 1819. It has been quoted by WR users interested in families traced before 1600. It is available online as images of the original pages at the Open Library (Google Books) as Vol I, Vol II and Vol III.
• Unfortunately, the Institute of Historical Research only includes two volumes of the Victoria County History for Cheshire on their website and these only cover the City of Chester. There may be other volumes to this series in print, but a Google Search does not indicate any further volumes online.

Maps

• Cheshire Archives and Local Studies have organized a facility to compare tithe maps circa 1830 and 19th century Ordnance Survey maps with the modern Ordnance Survey. These are available for every civil parish. A knob in the centre of the screen allows the user to move back and forth between the old and the new view. Use the key on the left to show other possibilities including land ownership.
• The diagrammatical map of Sanitary Districts in Cheshire showing Civil Parishes 1888 produced by the Ordnance Survey and provided by A Vision of Britain through Time is helpful. "Sanitary Districts" were the predecessors of rural districts and usually followed the same boundaries.
• The Ordnance Survey map of Cheshire circa 1900 supplied by A Vision of Britain through Time shows invidual settlements as well as parishes. There were significant administrative changes in the decade 1890-1900 that have led to some civil parishes absorbed into adjacent urban districts being omitted from this map.
• A Vision of Britain through Time provides a series of maps from the Ordnance Survey illustrating the towns and villages of Cheshire and also the borders between parishes. The following group of maps provide views of the county at various dates, illustrating the changes in administrative structure.

• The southern part of Cheshire in the 1830s as far north as Nantwich and Crewe on the east and Coddington on the west.
• The Wirral Peninsula in the 1830s
• The whole of Cheshire in 1888 with Sanitary Districts and 19th century civil parishes outlined
• The entire county in 1900 with Rural and Urban Districts. This map locates village, hamlets, churches, roads, railways, canals, industrial sites, manorial estates, etc. Unfortunately the copy of the map available online has been annotated in pencil, making some parishes difficult to inspect.
• 1931-1944 The county, with the numerous revisions to Rural and Urban Districts which occurred in the 1930s. This map locates village and hamlets, but they are more easily seen on the map of 1900.

• For a close-up view of an area as it looked in the 19th century, try the National Library of Scotland provision. The maps include the Ordnance Survey (OS) 25-inch to the mile series for England and Wales for the period 1841-1952. Country estates and factory buildings on the edge of towns are labelled; roads, railways, rivers and canals are shown.