Place:Plympton St. Maurice, Devon, England

A Vision of Britain through Time provides the following description of Plympton St. Maurice (#16 on map) from John Bartholomew's Gazetteer of the British Isles of 1887:

"Plympton.-- (or Plympton Earls or Maurice), small market town with ry. sta., Devon, near the river Plym, 1 mile SE. of the sta. and 4½ E. of Plymouth, 232 ac., pop. 1146; P.O., [Telegraph Office], 1 Bank. Market-day, Friday. Plympton is an ancient place, and was long a borough by prescription, sending 2 members to Parliament from Edward I. until 1832. At the E. end of the town are the relics of a castle said to have been demolished in the reign of King Stephen. At the grammar school, a well-endowed institution founded in 1658, Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), a native of Plympton, received his education. In addition to the weekly markets there are markets on the first Monday of every month for horses, cattle, and sheep, and several fairs are held annually. Plympton House, once the seat of the Treby family, is now a lunatic asylum."

"It has in the parish only about 170 [acres] of land, and 933 inhabitants, including 95 in Plympton House Lunatic Asylum....The town consists of four small streets, with a few respectable houses in the suburbs." (Source: White's Devonshire Directory (1850) as provided by GENUKI.)

"It was an ancient stannary town: an important trading centre in the past for locally mined tin, and a former seaport (before the River Plym silted up and trade moved down the river to Plymouth)." (Source: Wikipedia)

Plympton St. Maurice was also known as Plympton Earls, or Plympton Erle, or just Plympton. In area it was much smaller than the neighbouring parish of Plympton St. Mary (#15), and because of its greater density of population it was considered to be a town.

Before 1966, when it was amalgamated into Plymouth, it was in the Plympton St. Mary Rural District

Registration Districts

• Plympton St. Mary Registration District (1837-1936)
• Plympton Registration District (1936-1967)

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.

• the Devon Heritage Centre at Exeter
• the Northern Record Office at Barnstaple
• the Plymouth and West Devon Record Office at Plymouth which is independent of the other two.

• 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.

• The FamilySearch Wiki provides a similar information service to GENUKI. An index of parishes leads to notes and references for each parish.

• Brett Langston's list of Devon Registration Districts and parishes within each registration district from 1837 to the present can indicate where to find details of civil registration entries since the process began in England.

• 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.
• There are census transcriptions for 1841 and for parts (perhaps the whole) of 1861 and 1871 available online through the GENUKI pages.