Place:Plympton St. Mary, Devon, England

NamePlympton St. Mary
Alt namesPlintonasource: Domesday Book (1985) p 85
Plintonesource: Domesday Book (1985) p 85
Plymptonsource: old name for parish, also colloquial usage today
Plympton St Mary
Plympton-St. Marysource: hyphenated
Plympton Saint Mary
Chelson Meadowsource: estate in parish
Colebrook (Plympton St. Mary)source: village in parish
Hemerdonsource: hamlet in parish
Lee Mill Bridgesource: village in parish
Ridgwaysource: village in parish
Sparkwellsource: hamlet in parish
Ventonsource: hamlet in parish
Underwoodsource: village in parish
TypeAncient parish, Civil parish, Suburb
Coordinates50.388°N 4.059°W
Located inDevon, England
See alsoPlympton Hundred, Devon, Englandhundred of which the parish was a part
Plympton St. Mary Rural, Devon, Englandrural district in which the parish was located 1894-1974
Plymouth Unitary Authority, Devon, Englandunitary authority covering the area since 1967
NOTE: Plympton (the original name for this page) is now a merger of several individual civil parishes surrounding Plymouth that occurred in 1967. Plympton St. Mary, Plympton St. Maurice (#15) (also known as Plympton Earls) and Plymstock (#16) were separate civil parishes before that date. Each of them has a separate page in this database. This is the page for Plympton St. Mary.


Plympton St. Mary (#14 on map) was the largest by area of the parishes discussed above. It was used as a base for civil registration and census registration from 1837. In 1967 it was amalgamated into Plymouth. Before 1974 the parish was in the Plympton St. Mary Rural District and the centre of administration for the district. Throughout the 19th century it was a rural sanitary district.

There was no village named Plympton St. Mary, but the parish included the villages of Ridgway, Underwood, and Colebrook, and the hamlets of Hemerdon, Sparkwell, Venton, and part of Lee Mill Bridge. Sparkwell (#19) was considered to be a civil parish during the 19th century, but no dates are given in A Vision of Britain through Time.

GENUKI provides a quote from White's Devonshire Directory of 1850 describing the parish at that time.

Image:Plympton St. Mary RD 1931 1944.png

Registration Districts

and then amalgamated into Plymouth.

Research Tips

(revised Jul 2021)

  • Ordnance Survey Map of Devonshire North and Devonshire South are large-scale maps covering the whole of Devon between them. They show the parish boundaries when Rural Districts were still in existence and before the mergers of parishes that took place in 1935 and 1974. When expanded the maps can show many of the small villages and hamlets inside the parishes. These maps are now downloadable for personal use but they can take up a lot of computer memory.
  • GENUKI has a selection of maps showing the boundaries of parishes in the 19th century. The contribution from "Know Your Place" on Devon is a huge website yet to be discovered in detail by this contributor.
  • Devon has three repositories for hands-on investigation of county records. Each has a website which holds their catalog of registers and other documents.
  • There is, however, a proviso regarding early records for Devon. Exeter was badly hit in a "blitz" during World War II and the City Library, which then held the county archives, was burnt out. About a million books and historic documents went up in smoke. While equivalent records--particularly wills--are quite easy to come by for other English counties, some records for Devon and surrounding counties do not exist.
  • Devon Family History Society Mailing address: PO Box 9, Exeter, EX2 6YP, United Kingdom. The society has branches in various parts of the county. It is the largest Family History Society in the United Kingdom. The website has a handy guide to each of the parishes in the county and publishes the registers for each of the Devon dioceses on CDs.
  • This is the home page to the GENUKI Devon website. It has been updated since 2015 and includes a lot of useful information on each parish.
  • Devon has a Online Parish Clerk (OPC) Project which can be reached through GENUKI. Only about half of the parishes have a volunteer contributing local data. For more information, consult the website, especially the list at the bottom of the homepage.
  • Magna Britannia, Volume 6 by Daniel Lysons and Samuel Lysons. A general and parochial history of the county. Originally published by T Cadell and W Davies, London, 1822, and placed online by British History Online. This is a volume of more than 500 pages of the history of Devon, parish by parish. It is 100 years older than the Victoria County Histories available for some other counties, but equally thorough in its coverage. Contains information that may have been swept under the carpet in more modern works.
  • There is a cornucopia of county resources at Devon Heritage. Topics are: Architecture, Census, Devon County, the Devonshire Regiment, Directory Listings, Education, Genealogy, History, Industry, Parish Records, People, Places, Transportation, War Memorials. There are fascinating resources you would never guess that existed from those topic titles. (NOTE: There may be problems reaching this site. One popular browser provider has put a block on it. This may be temporary, or it may be its similarity in name to the Devon Heritage Centre at Exeter.)
  • Users studying the Plymouth area are recommended to check the GENUKI page for Plymouth which is lengthy but recently updated (summer 2015). Two entries under the heading "Genealogy" are:
  • Donald Curkeet's Plymouth Devonshire and Surrounding Parishes for Family Genealogy website provides church and churhyard photographs, and information, in some cases including parish register name indexes, for a number of Plymouth area parishes. He provided a very useful sketchmap.
  • Plymouth is one of the growing number of places for which the Devon Heritage website provides census or parish register transcriptions, articles, and/or illustrations, etc. (For Plymouth they supply lists on specific events or groups of people at varying dates.)
  • The Plymouth Museums Art Galleries website describes the 'Of the Parish' headstone and memorial indexing and photography project with explanations of how to search for names in various indexes provided by a number of local groups. The remains in many of the early cemeteries within Plymouth were transferred to the cemetery in Egg Buckland or Eggbuckland after World War II. Other sections of this website might also be of interest to genealogists searching for ancestors in the Plymouth area.
  • GENUKI has online transcriptions of a number of the censuses for Plympton St. Mary between 1841 and 1911.