Place:Parkgate, Cheshire, England

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

source: Family History Library Catalog

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Parkgate is a village on the Wirral Peninsula in Cheshire, England, on the banks of the River Dee, adjoining of salt marsh. At the 2011 Census, it had a population of 3,591.

Parkgate was part of the Neston cum Parkgate Urban District from 1894 until 1933 when the name of the urban district was changed to Neston Urban District.

In the nationwide municipal reorganization of 1974, Neston Urban District joined with the Municipal Borough of Ellesmere Port and various other nearby municipalities to become Ellesmere Port and Neston district municipality. The Cheshire West and Chester unitary authority took over in 2009.

History

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Parkgate was an important port from the start of the 18th century, in particular as an embarkation point for Ireland. The River Dee, which served as a shipping lane to the Roman city of Deva (Chester), had silted up, in part by 383 AD, creating a need for a port further downstream. Quays were built, first at Burton and later near the small town of Neston, but further silting required yet another re-siting slightly further downstream near the gate of Neston's hunting park. Hence the settlement of Parkgate was born.

Two distinguished guests stayed at local hostelries. One was Lord Nelson's mistress, (Lady) Emma Hamilton, who was born in nearby Ness and bathed at Parkgate, apparently as a cure for a skin complaint. Another was George Frideric Handel. Contrary to often-repeated legend he did not stay in Parkgate before sailing to Dublin in November 1741 for the first performance of his Messiah (he travelled from Holyhead). However, he returned from Ireland via Parkgate in August 1742.

As the Dee silted up even further, Parkgate became unusable as a port and was superseded by the port of Liverpool, on the nearby River Mersey. Towards the end of the 18th century Parkgate was popular as a seaside resort with bathers, but this diminished as the sands of the estuary were consumed with grass. Sailing from Parkgate across the estuary to Bagillt was still possible in 1864, as there is report of an accident in which the landlord of the Pengwern Arms and his brother were drowned when trying to land in rough sea conditions – three others survived. But as silting progressed, with no beach and no direct access to the sea, Parkgate could manage only small subsistence from fishing and shrimps. The silting of the Dee has been accelerated by the deliberate introduction of the invasive colonising grass Sporobolus anglicus in Connah's Quay in 1928, resulting in the growth of extensive marshlands.

Mostyn House School, a striking black-and-white building, was opened in Parkgate in 1855. From 1862 until it closed in 2010, it was run by the Grenfell family, most recently as an independent co-educational day school. Sir Wilfred Grenfell (1865–1940), famous medical missionary to Newfoundland and Labrador, was born in Parkgate and was a pupil at the school. The 6th Duke of Westminster's children attended Mostyn House, including his son the 7th Duke of Westminster.

During the Second World War, two of Parkgate's houses which both contained cellars were converted into air raid shelters for public protection from German bombing. Small lights were placed on the marsh to trick the bombers into thinking settlements were on the marshes.

After the war, Parkgate flourished as a highly desirable residential area. The surrounds became a conservation area in 1973.

The Anglican Church of St. Thomas reopened for worship in May 2010. Built in 1843, it had been closed since it was declared unsafe in 1994.

Research Tips

Definitions

• 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 and his bishop. 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 that never became independent civil parishes, 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.
• Registration districts were responsible for civil registration or vital statistics and census records. The boundaries of these districts were revised from time to time depending on population density and local government organization. To ascertain the registration district to which a parish belonged in the timeframe in question, see Registration Districts in Cheshire, part of the UK_BMD website.

Helpful Sources

• Cheshire Archives and Local Studies are the local keepers of historical material for the county. But archives for places that were absorbed into Greater Manchester and Merseyside in 1974 may have been moved to the archive centres for the metropolitan county concerned.
• FamilySearch Cheshire 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).
• The GENUKI pages on Cheshire and its parishes point to many other sources of information on places within the county. The many small parishes and townships that existed before 1866 are treated individually as well as the larger towns and conurbations. The GENUKI pages for individual parishes now include a map of the parish and its surrounding area.
• A Vision of Britain through Time also has summaries and lists of statistics for each parish, but its organization is not for the beginning family historian in a hurry.
• The pay websites Ancestry and FindMyPast have a number of county-wide collections of censuses, Church of England baptisms, marriages and burials (some from the 1500s), and some providing microfilm copies of the manuscript entries. An international subscription is necessary to access Ancestry's UK holdings.
• A book entitled The history of the county palatine and city of Chester with the subtitle "compiled from original evidences in public offices, the Harleian and Cottonian mss., parochial registers, private muniments, unpublished ms. collections of successive Cheshire antiquaries, and a personal survey of every township in the county, incorporated with a re-publication of King's Vale royal and Leycester's Cheshire antiquities" by George Ormerod and others was published in 1819. It has been quoted by WR users interested in families traced before 1600. It is available online as images of the original pages at the Open Library (Google Books) as Vol I, Vol II and Vol III.
• Unfortunately, the Institute of Historical Research only includes two volumes of the Victoria County History for Cheshire on their website and these only cover the City of Chester. There may be other volumes to this series in print, but a Google Search does not indicate any further volumes online.

Maps

• Cheshire Archives and Local Studies have organized a facility to compare tithe maps circa 1830 and 19th century Ordnance Survey maps with the modern Ordnance Survey. These are available for every civil parish. A knob in the centre of the screen allows the user to move back and forth between the old and the new view. Use the key on the left to show other possibilities including land ownership.
• The diagrammatical map of Sanitary Districts in Cheshire showing Civil Parishes 1888 produced by the Ordnance Survey and provided by A Vision of Britain through Time is helpful. "Sanitary Districts" were the predecessors of rural districts and usually followed the same boundaries.
• The Ordnance Survey map of Cheshire circa 1900 supplied by A Vision of Britain through Time shows invidual settlements as well as parishes. There were significant administrative changes in the decade 1890-1900 that have led to some civil parishes absorbed into adjacent urban districts being omitted from this map.
• A Vision of Britain through Time provides a series of maps from the Ordnance Survey illustrating the towns and villages of Cheshire and also the borders between parishes. The following group of maps provide views of the county at various dates, illustrating the changes in administrative structure.

• The southern part of Cheshire in the 1830s as far north as Nantwich and Crewe on the east and Coddington on the west.
• The Wirral Peninsula in the 1830s
• The whole of Cheshire in 1888 with Sanitary Districts and 19th century civil parishes outlined
• The entire county in 1900 with Rural and Urban Districts. This map locates village, hamlets, churches, roads, railways, canals, industrial sites, manorial estates, etc. Unfortunately the copy of the map available online has been annotated in pencil, making some parishes difficult to inspect.
• 1931-1944 The county, with the numerous revisions to Rural and Urban Districts which occurred in the 1930s. This map locates village and hamlets, but they are more easily seen on the map of 1900.

• For a close-up view of an area as it looked in the 19th century, try the National Library of Scotland provision. The maps include the Ordnance Survey (OS) 25-inch to the mile series for England and Wales for the period 1841-1952. Country estates and factory buildings on the edge of towns are labelled; roads, railways, rivers and canals are shown.