Place:Milnrow, Lancashire, England

:the following text is based on an article in Wikipedia Milnrow (pop. 12,500) is now a suburban town within the Metropolitan Borough of Rochdale, in Greater Manchester, England. It lies on the River Beal at the foothills of the South Pennines, and forms a continuous urban area with Rochdale. It is east of Rochdale's town centre, north-northeast of the city of Manchester, and spans across urban, suburban and rural locations—-from Windy Hill in the east through to the Rochdale Canal in the west. Milnrow includes the villages of Tunshill and Newhey (both redirected here). Until 1974 Milnrow was a part of Lancashire. During the Middle Ages was a hamlet located within the township of Butterworth and parish of Rochdale. It was named by the Anglo-Saxons, but the Norman conquest of England resulted in its ownership by minor Norman families, such as the Schofields and Cleggs. In the 15th century, the descendants of these families successfully agitated for a chapel of ease to be constructed in Milnrow by the banks of the River Beal, triggering its development as the main settlement in Butterworth. Despite this distinction, Milnrow did not increase much further in size or population until the dawn of the woollen trade in the Late Middle Ages. To supplement their income, the inhabitants of Milnrow produced flannel and woollen cloth in purpose-built weavers' cottages, some of which have survived as listed buildings from the Early Modern period. Coalmining and metalworking also flourished in this period, but the Industrial Revolution supplanted the domestic industries and converted Milnrow into an urban mill town that mass-produced textile goods in cotton mills, such as Ellenroad Ring Mill (now a museum). The Milnrow Urban District was established in 1894 and was governed by its own district council until its abolition in 1974 when there was a nationwide reorganization of municipalities and the Metropolitan Borough of Rochdale was formed.

Milnrow has been described as "the centre of the south Lancashire dialect". John Collier (who wrote under the pseudonym of Tim Bobbin) was an acclaimed 18th-century caricaturist and satirical poet from Milnrow who wrote in a broad Lancashire dialect. Rochdale-born poet Edwin Waugh was influenced by Collier's work, and wrote an extensive account of Milnrow during the mid-19th century in a tribute to Collier. Although Milnrow's heavy textile industries declined during the mid-20th century, the town has continued to grow as a result of suburbanisation, urban renewal and its immediate proximity to road, rail and motorway networks.

Geography

There are a number of small named-places in and around Milnrow, including Clegg, Firgrove, Gallows, Haugh, Newhey, Kitcliffe, Ogden, and Tunshill (all redirected here). Newhey, the southernmost part of Milnrow, close to the village of Shaw and Crompton, is the most distinct of these areas, and, with its own parish church and Metrolink station. It is invariably given as a separate village. The Gallows public house is said to occupy the land of an ancient execution site; Gallows, a former hamlet at northeastern Milnrow, is named in reference to a baronial gallows. Kitcliffe, Ogden and Tunshill, to the east of central Milnrow, are hamlets that occupy the upper, mid and lower Piethorne Valley respectively.

The map above is based on one in Victoria County Histories (reference below). More of the many settlements around Milnrow are visible on the original map.

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 description of the township of Butterworth, the predecessor of Milnrow, from British History Online (Victoria County Histories), published 1911