Place:Knowsley, Lancashire, England

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

source: Family History Library Catalog

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia Knowsley (#8 on the map) is, since 1974, a large village and civil parish within the Metropolitan Borough of Knowsley in Merseyside, England. It is more commonly known as Knowsley Village. According to the 2001 UK Census the parish had a population of 11,343. It gave its name to the wider Borough of Knowsley when it was formed in 1974. In 2010, the village of Knowsley merged with Prescot under the name Prescot. From 1894 until 1974 the village and its civil parish had been located in Whiston Rural District in Lancashire. Prior to that again, it was a township in the ancient parish of Huyton. It became a civil parish in 1866. There are three main built-up areas in the parish: the village of Knowsley, the nearby business park in the northwest, and a suburban area including Stockbridge Village in the southwest which includes the northern fringe of Huyton. To the west of the village is the area of Woolfall Heath [not described by Wikipedia].

History

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

The village of Knowsley is hundreds of years older than the neighbouring City of Liverpool. Its name occurs in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Chenulveslei located in the West Derby Hundred of Lancashire, and has been recorded as Knuvesle (1199); Knouselegh (1258); Knouleslee (1261); Knusele (1262); and Knouslegh (1346).

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).

"KNOWSLEY, a township-chapelry in Huyton parish, Lancashire; 2½ miles N by W of Huyton [railway] station, and 3 NW by W of Prescot. Post town: Prescot. Acres: 4,750. Real property: £12,549; of which £1,367 are in mines, and £330 in quarries. Population in 1851: 1,486; in 1861: 1,349. Houses: 243.

"The property all belongs to the Earl of Derby. Knowsley Hall is the Earl's seat; has been enlarged from time to time: includes portions of the period of Henry VII.; was fully restored, by the tenth earl, before 1735; presents imposing fronts, surmounted by round towers; contains portraits of all the Stanleys, and a large and valuable collection of paintings by the old masters; and was visited, in November 1865, by the Prince and Princess of Wales. The grounds around it comprise upwards of 2, 000 acres; are enclosed by a stone wall upwards of 8 feet high, pierced by thirteen entrances; and contain tasteful gardens, many ancient oaks, and ornamental waters nearly a mile long.

"The living is a [perpetual] curacy in the diocese of Chester. Value: £300.* Patron: the Earl of Derby. The church is recent, cruciform, and handsome; and has a "W" broach spire. There are national schools."

Wikipedia notes that Capability Brown was responsible for creating some of Knowsley's landscaped gardens in the 1770s, and Edward Lear wrote "The Owl and the Pussycat" while staying at Knowsley Hall. Knowsley Hall is the ancestral home of the Stanley family, the Earls of Derby from 1485.

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 township of Knowsley from British History Online (Victoria County Histories), published 1911