Place:Speke, Lancashire, England

source: Family History Library Catalog

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

Speke (#10 on the map) is now an area of Merseyside, England (like the rest of Liverpool it was in Lancashire until 1974). It is 7.7 miles (12.4 km) southeast of Liverpool city centre. Located near the widest part of the River Mersey, it is bordered on the north by the Liverpool suburbs of Garston and Little Woolton, and on the east the parishes of Halewood, Hale. [edit] History the text in this section is based on a section of an article in Wikipedia The name derives from the Old English Spec, meaning 'brushwood'. It was known by this name in the Domesday Book of 1086, which gave Speke Hall (now open to the public) as one of the properties held by the Anglo-Saxon Uctred. In the mid 14th century, the manors of Speke, Whiston, Skelmersdale, and Parr were held by William Dacre, 2nd Baron Dacre (1319-1361).

Until the 1930s, Speke was a small village with a population of 400; by the end of the 1950s more than 25,000 people were living in the area. The local All Saints Church was built by the last resident owner of Speke Hall, Miss Adelaide Watt, a member of the Watt family who had owned the Speke Estate since 1795.

The estate was bought by the Liverpool Corporation in 1928 for £200,000; the corporation's intention was to build a complete self-contained satellite town (at a time when the garden city movement was underway). The parish of Speke became part of the county borough of Liverpool in 1932, having previously been part of Whiston Rural District.

Constructed between 1930 and 1933, by the start of World War II, Speke Airport was the second busiest in the UK. Retention of control by the Ministry of Civil Aviation in London after the war meant that it had lost this position by the 1950s. The industrial rise of Speke continued until the mid-1970s, when an equally rapid decline ensued over the next 20 years, particularly during the recessions of the early 1980s and early 1990s. The Triumph car production plant was based at Speke, as was the Bryant and May match factory. Both had closed by 1994. The area has however retained a cluster of pharmaceutical facilities, with companies operated by Eli Lilly and Company, MedImmune, and Novartis.

Research Tips

• See the Wikipedia articles on parishes and civil parishes for descriptions of this lowest rung of local administration. The original parishes were ecclesiastical (described as ancient parishes), under the jurisdiction of the local priest. 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, have been redirected into the parish in which they are located. The names of these smaller places are italicized within the text.
• An urban district was a type of municipality in existence between 1894 and 1974. They were formed as a middle layer of administration between the county and the civil parish and were used for urban areas usually with populations of under 30,000. Inspecting the archives of a urban district will not be of much help to the genealogist or family historian, unless there is need to study land records in depth.
• Civil registration or vital statistics and census records will be found within registration districts. To ascertain the registration district to which a parish belongs, see Registration Districts in Lancashire, part of the UK_BMD website.
• The terms municipal borough and county borough were adopted in 1835 replacing the historic "boroughs". Municipal boroughs generally had populations between 30,000 and 50,000; while county boroughs usually had populations of over 50,000. County boroughs had local governments independent of the county in which they were located, but municipal boroughs worked in tandem with the county administration. Wikipedia explains these terms in much greater detail.
• Lancashire Online Parish Clerks provide free online information from the various parishes, along with other data of value to family and local historians conducting research in the County of Lancashire.
• FamilySearch Lancashire 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).
• Ancestry (international subscription necessary) has a number of county-wide collections of Church of England baptisms, marriages and burials, some from the 1500s, and some providing microfilm copies of the manuscript entries. There are specific collections for Liverpool (including Catholic baptisms and marriages) and for Manchester. Their databases now include electoral registers 1832-1935. Another pay site is FindMyPast.
• A map of Lancashire circa 1888 supplied by A Vision of Britain through Time includes the boundaries between the parishes and shows the hamlets within them.
• A map of Lancashire circa 1954 supplied by A Vision of Britain through Time is a similar map for a later timeframe.
• GENUKI provides a website covering many sources of genealogical information for Lancashire. The organization is gradually updating the website and the volunteer organizers may not have yet picked up all the changes that have come with improving technology.
• The Victoria County History for Lancashire, provided by British History Online, covers the whole of the county in six volumes (the seventh available volume [numbered Vol 2] covers religious institutions). The county is separated into its original hundreds and the volumes were first published between 1907 and 1914. Most parishes within each hundred are covered in detail. Maps within the text can contain historical information not available elsewhere.
• A description of the township of Speke from British History Online (Victoria County Histories), published 1911