Place:Sidbury, Devon, England

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia Sidbury is civil parish with a large village north of Sidmouth on the A375 road in Devon, England. In 2011 the built-up area (a smaller area than the original civil parish) had a population of 457. In 1951 the civil parish had a population of 2,507. Sidbury was a civil parish until 1935 when it was absorbed into the Urban District of Sidmouth. The whole area has been part of the East Devon District since 1974. It is situated on the River Sid, which rises at Crowpits Covert and runs for 6 miles (10 km) to Lyme Bay at Sidmouth. Above the village is Sidbury Castle, the site of an Iron Age hill fort. Sidbury is mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086 as the manor of "Sideberia", held by Bishop Osbern of Exeter. The Church of St Peter and St Giles has a Norman tower holding 8 bells, topped with a spire, a Saxon crypt, a gunpowder storage room dating from the Napoleonic era and a 500-year-old font. Both the tower and the rest of the church are Norman but the tower was accurately rebuilt in 1884. The north aisle is possibly 13th century and the south porch Perpendicular. The windows are medieval and of various periods; the octagonal font is Perpendicular. The church is a Grade I listed building. The manor house, Sidbury Manor, lies 1 km (0.62 mi) northwest of the village centre.

A Vision of Britain through Time provides the following description of Sidbury from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1871-72:

"SIDBURY, a village and a parish in Honiton [registration] district, Devon. The village stands on the river Sid, 3 miles N by E of Sidmouth [railway] station; was once a market town; and has a post-office under Sidmouth, and fairs on the Tuesday before Holy Thursdav and the Wednesday before 20 Sept. The parish contains also the village of Sidford and the hamlet of Harcombe. Acres: 6,827. Real property: £9,682. Population in 1851: 1,872; in l861: 1,682. Houses: 358. Cotford House is the seat of W. R. Bayley, Esq.; and Court Hall, of R. Hunt, Esq. A camp, successively British, Roman, Saxon, and Danish, and measuring about 1,500 feet by 300, is on the ridge of Castle Hill; and several ancient earthworks are in other parts. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Exeter. Value: £606. Patrons: the Dean and Chapter of [Exeter]. The church is partly Norman, partly later English; and has a tower, rebuilt in 1846. There are an Independent chapel, a national school, and charities £83."

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.)