Place:Steventon, Berkshire, England

source: Family History Library Catalog

Steventon is a village and civil parish about 4 miles south of Abingdon and a similar distance west of Didcot. The parish was part of Berkshire, England until the 1974 boundary changes transferred to Oxfordshire.

Steventon was an ancient parish in the Ock Hundred and the Abingdon Poor Law Union. The parish was located in the Abingdon Rural District 1894-1974, and since that date in the Vale of White Horse District of Oxfordshire.

History

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

The Causeway is a medieval cobbled path and former road nearly long running almost east–west through the village linking St Michael's church with the Abingdon – Newbury main road. The south side of the Causeway is lined by houses, a number of which are medieval timber-framed buildings. Steventon is on what used to be the main road between Oxford, Abingdon and Newbury. The section from Oxford and Abingdon through Steventon to Chilton Pond was turnpiked in 1755. From the 1920s it was classified the A34 road. In the 1970s the A34 was re-routed as a dual carriageway bypassing Abingdon, Drayton and Steventon, and the section between Steventon Hill and Abingdon was detrunked and reclassified as the B4017.

The route of the abandoned Wilts & Berks Canal passes through the west of Steventon parish, about west-northwest of the village. Building had begun in 1796 at Semington Junction in Wiltshire and reached West Challow in 1807. The final section, from West Challow through Steventon to Abingdon, was completed in 1810. There was a Steventon Lock in the parish. Traffic on the canal had virtually ceased by 1901 and the route was formally abandoned in 1914. The Wilts & Berks Canal Trust is currently restoring the canal. In June 1840 the Great Western Railway opened Steventon railway station. It was the main station for Oxford, to the north, until in 1844 the line from Didcot to was opened. British Railways closed Steventon station in 1964. The nearest station is now Didcot Parkway, about east of Steventon.

Steventon was the last place in North Berkshire to continue open field farming. Parliament passed an inclosure act for Steventon's common land in 1807–08, but it was not implemented. In 1880 Parliament passed a second act to enclose the parish. The enclosure award was made in 1883 and implemented in 1885.

During a party in the early hours of New Year's Day 2003 Robert Tyrrell, the then landlord of the North Star pub in Steventon, bulldozed part of his own pub after his barman refused to serve him. Tyrrell was sentenced to 200 hours of community service and fined more than £3,000. The pub was repaired and re-opened by December 2003. The 17th-century timber-framed building is Grade II listed, and its restoration cost Tyrrell more than £100,000. In 2007 the work won a Vale of White Horse Design Scheme Award for Andrew Townsend, a local architect from Faringdon who designed the pub's restoration.

Research Tips

Maps

• GENUKI's collection of maps for Berkshire. For basic reference are the two online maps Berkshire Parishes (highly recommended) and Berkshire Poor Law Union areas. These locate the individual parishes and indicate the urban and rural districts to which each belonged. There are many other maps listed, some covering specific parts of the county.
• Wikipedia's outline map of the unitary authorities, shown on many of their Berkshire pages, shows how the new divisions of government relate to the former districts. It has to be remembered that the county was reshaped in 1974 with the urban and rural districts of Abingdon and Faringdon and part of Wantage going to Oxfordshire, and the Borough of Slough (with Eton) coming in from Buckinghamshire. Every attempt is being made to indicate here in WeRelate the civil parishes, towns and villages for which these transfers occurred. Currently there are maps to be found on place pages that deal with civil parishes that transferred from Buckinghamshire into Berkshire. It is planned to provide maps within WeRelate for places that transferred from Berkshire to Oxfordshire--a much wider geographical area.
• The extensive collection provided by Genmaps is provided free of charge online (currently offline, March 2016).
• The Ordnance Survey has produced an up-to-date map of the boundaries of all the post-1974 districts throughout the country. This also shows the electoral constituency boundaries which are destined to change before 2020.

Online Historical References

• Berkshire Record Office. The Berkshire Record Office [BRO] was established in 1948 to locate and preserve records relating to the county of Berkshire and its people, and anyone who is interested in the county's past. As well as original documents, catalogues and indexes, there is a library at the Record Office.
• Berkshire Family History Society Research Centre. "The Berks FHS Centre can help you - wherever your ancestors came from. There is a Research Centre Library open to all."
• West Berkshire Museum, Newbury, is housed in a building with an interesting past, but is currently closed for redevelopment. No information on their collections.
• The GENUKI provision for Berkshire has been updated more recently than that for some of the other counties. A member of the Berkshire Family History Society is credited with this revision.
• The FamilySearch Wiki on Berkshire explains the jurisdictions relating to civil affairs, parishes and probate (wills and testaments) for each parish in the county and also outlines when these jurisdictions were in existence. Alterations required to cover the post-1974 period have not been carried out for every parish concerned.
• Brett Langston's list of Registration Districts in Berkshire will lead to specific parishes with dates.
• Local History Online is a compilation of websites from Berkshire local history clubs, societies and associations.
• The Berkshire section of The Victoria History of the Counties of England, in four volumes, is provided by British History Online. Volumes 3 and 4 provide an extensive history of the county, parish by parish, up to the end of the 19th century. There are local maps illustrating the text. Manors and their owners are discussed. Parishes are arranged in their original "hundreds"; the hundred for each placename in the Berkshire section of WeRelate will eventually be available.

Nineteenth Century Local Administration

English Jurisdictions is a webpage provided by FamilySearch which analyses every ecclesiastical parish in England at the year 1851. It provides, with the aid of outline maps, the date at which parish records and bishops transcripts begin, non-conformist denominations with a chapel within the parish, the names of the jurisdictions in charge: county, civil registration district, probate court, diocese, rural deanery, poor law union, hundred, church province; and links to FamilySearch historical records, FamilySearch Catalog and the FamilySearch Wiki. Two limitations: only England, and at the year 1851.

During the 19th century two bodies, the Poor Law Union and the Sanitary District, had responsibility for governmental functions at a level immediately above that covered by the civil parish. In 1894 these were replace by Rural and Urban Districts. These were elected bodies, responsible for setting local property assessments and taxes as well as for carrying out their specified duties. Thses districts continued in operation until 1974. Urban districts for larger municipalities were called "Municipal Boroughs" and had additional powers and obligations.

Poor Law Unions, established nationally in 1834, combined parishes together for the purpose of providing relief for the needy who had no family support. This led to the building of '"union poorhouses" or "workhouses" funded by all the parishes in the union. The geographical boundaries established for the individual Poor Law Unions were employed again when Registration Districts were formed three years later. In 1875 Sanitary Districts were formed to provide services such as clean water supply, sewage systems, street cleaning, and the clearance of slum housing. These also tended to follow the same geographical boundaries, although there were local alterations caused by changes in population distribution.