Place:Old Stratford, Warwickshire, England

source: Family History Library Catalog

A Vision of Britain through Time provides the following description of Old Stratford from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1870-72:

"STRATFORD (Old), a parish and a [registration] sub-district in Warwick[shire]. The parish contains Stratford-upon-Avon borough, Old Stratford proper, and Luddington hamlet in Stratford-upon-Avon [registration] district, and Bushwood hamlet in Solihull [registration] district. Post town: Stratford-upon-Avon. Acres: 6,860. Real property: £34,724; of which £500 are in gasworks. Population in 1851: 6,456; in 1861: 6,823. Houses: 1,477. Clopton House was long the seat of the Clopton family, and was recently renovated. Welcombe Lodge was the residence of the Combes, the friends of Shakespeare, and has been dismantled. A mineral spring is at Bishopton. Entrenchments, formed in war-like operations between the Saxons and the Danes, are at Welcombe. The living is a vicarage, with the chapelry of St. James-the-Great, in the diocese of Worcester. Value: £239. Patron: the Countess of Amherst. The church will be noticed in the article on Stratford-upon-Avon. The chapelry of Holy Cross and the [perpetual] curacy of Bishopton are separate charges.

"The [registration] sub-district excludes [Stratford]-upon-Avon borough, includes 8 other parishes, and is in [Stratford]-upon-Avon [registration] district. Acres: 22,680. Population: 5,931. Houses: 1,323."

Old Stratford was the ancient parish of which Stratford upon Avon was part. Holy Trinity Church on the edge of Stratford upon Avon was also the parish church of Old Stratford. The relationship between the two was altered when Stratford upon Avon became a "municipal borough" in 1835. From that point Old Stratford was comprised of a number of hamlets and chapelries mostly surrounding Stratford, but some a distance away. The Victoria County History names Bishopton, Luddington, Shottery, Dodwell, Drayton, Clopton, Welcombe, Ruin Clifford and Bridgetown, and also the isolated hamlet of Bushwood. The hamlets in italics have been redirected to Old Stratford.

In 1902 Old Stratford was divided in two parishes: Old Stratford Within and Old Stratford with Drayton. Old Stratford Within immediately surrounds Stratford upon Avon and was considered to be part of the Municipal Borough. Old Stratford with Drayton is located to its northwest and was not absorbed into the modern borough, i.e. Stratford on Avon District, until 2015. (See the 1931-1944 Ordnance Survey map of the county].)

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.

• Map of Warwickshire illustrating urban and rural districts in 1900 produced by UK Ordnance Survey and provided online by A Vision of Britain through Time. Parish boundaries and settlements within parishes are shown.
• Map of Warwickshire urban and rural districts in 1944 produced by UK Ordnance Survey and provided online by A Vision of Britain through Time. Parish boundaries and settlements within parishes are shown. This is not a repeat of the first map. There were a number of changes to urban and rural district structure in the 1930s.

• 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.
• Victoria County History - Warwickshire - Vol 6, pp 221-234 - Chapter: The borough of Stratford-upon-Avon: Introduction and architectural description. British History Online. University of London (London, 1951).