Place:Lowton, Lancashire, England

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia Lowton has been, since 1974, a suburban village within the Metropolitan Borough of Wigan, in Greater Manchester, England. It is around 2 miles (3.2 km) from Leigh, 7 miles (11 km) south of Wigan and 11.0 miles (17.7 km) west of Manchester city centre. The main settlement lies across the A580 East Lancashire Road. In the UK census of 2011 Lowton had a population of 14,605. Until 1974 Lowton was located close to the southern border of Lancashire. Its early history is marked by the presence of Byrom Manor, the ancestral home of Byroms, the family that included poet John Byrom (1692-1763), who invented a system of shorthand. During the time of the Industrial Revolution, Lowton was close to several collieries and factories and built up associations with coal mining and other manufacturing industries. Lowton was one of the townships of the ancient parish of Winwick and became a civil parish in 1866. Between 1894 and 1933, Lowton was part of Leigh Rural District. In 1933 the rural district was abolished and Lowton was absorbed into Golborne Urban District. In 1974, as part of the local government reorganisation enacted in the Local Government Act 1972, it became part of the Wigan Metropolitan Borough of Greater Manchester.

For more information, see the EN Wikipedia article Lowton.

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 Lowton from British History Online (Victoria County Histories), published 1911