- source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names
- source: Family History Library Catalog
- the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia
Kenilworth is a town and civil parish in
Warwickshire, England, about 5 miles (8 km) southwest of the centre of Coventry, 5 miles (8 km) north of Warwick and 90 miles (140 km) north-west of London. The town is on Finham Brook, a tributary of the River Sowe, which joins the River Avon about 2 miles (3 km) northeast of the town centre. The 2011 Census recorded a parish population of 22,413. Kenilworth is notable for the extensive ruins of Kenilworth Castle.
A settlement existed at Kenilworth by the time of the Domesday Book of 1086, which records it as Chinewrde meaning "farm of a woman named Cynehild".
Geoffrey de Clinton (d. 1134) initiated the building of an Augustinian priory in 1122, at the same time as he initiated the building of Kenilworth Castle. The priory was raised to the rank of abbey in 1450[2] and suppressed in the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s. Thereafter the abbey grounds next to the castle, were made common land in exchange for common land that Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester (1532-1588) used to enlarge the castle. Only a few walls and a storage barn of the original abbey survive.
For more information, see the EN Wikipedia article Kenilworth. This is quite a long article.
Kenilworth was originally a chapelry in the ancient parish of Stoneleigh, but became an ancient parish in its own right by 1500. It was located in the Knightlow Hundred of Warwickshire, England.
It was made a civil parish in 1866 and in 1894 it became an urban district. Since 1974 it has been part of the non-metropolitan Warwick District.
Research Tips
- GENUKI main page for Warwickshire provides information on various topics covering the whole of the county, and also a link to a list of parishes. Under each parish there is a list of the settlements within it and brief description of each. This is a list of pre-1834 ancient or ecclesiastical parishes but there are suggestions as to how to find parishes set up since then. GENUKI provides references to other organizations who hold genealogical information for the local area. There is no guarantee that the website has been kept up to date and therefore the reader should check additional sources if possible.
- Warwickshire and West Midland family history societies are listed in GENUKI.
- The FamilyTree Wiki has a series of pages similar to those provided by GENUKI which may have been prepared at a later date and from more recent data. The wiki has a link to English Jurisdictions 1851. There is a list of all the parishes in existence at that date with maps indicating their boundaries. The website is very useful for finding the ecclesiastical individual parishes within large cities and towns.
- A Vision of Britain through Time, Warwickshire, section "Units and Statistics" leads to analyses of population and organization of the county from about 1800 through 1974. There are pages available for all civil parishes, municipal boroughs and other administrative divisions. Descriptions provided are usually based on a gazetteer of 1870-72 which often provides brief notes on the economic basis of the settlement and significant occurences through its history.
- The two maps below indicate the boundaries between parishes, etc., but for a more detailed view of a specific area try a map from this selection. The oldest series are very clear at the third magnification offered. Comparing the map details with the GENUKI details for the same area is well worthwhile.
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- A map of the ancient divisions named "hundreds" is to be found in A Vision of Britain through Time. It shows the detached sections of Warwickshire as they were in 1832. These detached sections have now been moved into the counties that surrounded them.
- As of October 2016 Warwickshire Parish Registers, 1535-1984 are available to search online on FamilySearch
- As of September 2018 TheGenealogist has added over 1.5 million individuals to its Warwickshire Parish Record Collection and so increases the coverage of this Midland county for family researchers to find their ancestors baptisms, marriages and burials. These records are released in association with Warwickshire County Record Office and have the benefit of high quality images to complement the transcripts, making them a valuable resource for those with ancestors from this area. These are available to Genealogist Diamond Subscription holders.
- The website British History Online provides seven volumes of the Victoria County History Series on Warwickshire. The first (Vol 2) covers the religious houses of the county; Volumes 3 through 6 provide articles the settlements in each of the hundreds in turn, and Volumes 7 and 8 deal with Birmingham and Coventry respectively. References to individual parishes will be furnished as time permits.
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