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- the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia
Trafford is a metropolitan borough of Greater Manchester, England. With an estimated population of about 211,800 in 2006, it covers 41 square miles (106 km2) and includes the towns of Altrincham, Partington, Sale, all in Cheshire, and its most northern divisions, Stretford, and Urmston, both in Lancashire. The borough was formed on 1 April 1974 by the Local Government Act 1972 as a merger of the municipal boroughs of Altrincham, Sale, and Stretford, the urban districts of Bowdon, Hale (near Altrincham), and Urmston and part of Bucklow Rural District.
The area underwent change in the late 19th century and the population rapidly expanded with the arrival of the railway. The metropolitan boroughs of the City of Salford and the City of Manchester border Trafford to the north and east respectively; the Cheshire East area of Cheshire lies to the south.
The River Mersey runs east to west through the area, separating North Trafford (formerly located in Lancashire) from South Trafford (formerly located in Cheshire); other rivers in Trafford include the Bollin, the River Irwell, Sinderland Brook, and Crofts Bank Brook.
The Bridgewater Canal, opened in 1761 and completed in 1776, follows a course through Trafford roughly north to south and passes through Stretford, Sale, and Altrincham. The Manchester Ship Canal, opened in 1894, forms part of Trafford's northern and western boundaries with Salford.
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The North Trafford localities include:
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South Trafford localities include:
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For more information, see the EN Wikipedia article Trafford.
Research Tips
- In 1974 Lancashire was broken into four parts: Great Manchester, Merseyside (covering Liverpool and its environs), the section beyond Morecambe Bay known as the Lake District which became part of Cumbria, and the central part which remains as Lancashire.
- Lancashire Record Office. Address: Bow Lane, Preston PR1 2RE; Tel: 01772 533039; Email: record.office@lancashire.gov.uk
- Cumbria Archives or Barrow Archive and Local Studies Centre. Address: Ramsden Square, Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria LA14 1LL; Tel: 01229 407377; Email: barrow.archives@cumbria.gov.uk
- Greater Manchester County Record Office located at Great Manchester Central Library, St. Peter's Square, City Centre, M2 5PD; Tel: (Library: 0161 234 1983; Archives & special collections: 0161 234 1979); Email (Library: libraries@manchester.gov.uk, Archives & special collections: archiveslocalstudies@manchester.gov.uk). This covers the ten metropolitan boroughs that have made up Greater Manchester since 1974 and the former county boroughs, urban and rural districts from which they were formed.
- Liverpool Record Office Address: William Brown Street, Liverpool L3 8EW; Tel: not provided; Email: RecOffice.central.library@Liverpool.gov.uk. This covers the five metropolitan boroughs that have made up Liverpool since 1974 and the former county boroughs, urban and rural districts from which they were formed.
- County Library Headquarters (for Lancashire), P O Box 61, County Hall, Preston, PR1 8RJ. Lancashire County Libraries have a list of addresses and telephone numbers of local libraries in the modern administrative county of Lancashire. Guide to Lancashire Local Studies Collections, published by Lancashire County Library, gives information about which libraries have local studies sections, the records they hold, and the name of the library holding the information for towns without their own local studies library. Presumably, Preston Harris Library (found in this list) is the central library for the county.
- John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester has a major collection on Methodists.
- GENUKI has a page on the entire county of Lancashire and pages for each of the ecclesiastical parishes in the county. Under each parish there is a list of the settlements within it and brief description of each. The list is based on a gazetteer dated 1835 and there may have been a number of alterations to the parish setup since then. However, it is worthwhile information for the pre civil registration period. GENUKI provides references to other organizations who hold genealogical information for the local area.
- The FamilyTree Wiki has a series of pages similar to those provided by GENUKI which may have been prepared at a later date from more recent data. The wiki has a link to English Jurisdictions 1851 which gives the registration district and wapentake for each parish, together with statistics from the 1851 census for the area.
- A Vision of Britain through Time, Lancashire, section "Units and Statistics" leads to analyses of population and organization of the county from about 1800 through 1974. There are pages available for all civil parishes, municipal boroughs and other administrative divisions. Descriptions provided are usually based on a gazetteer of 1870-72.
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- The above three maps indicate the boundaries between parishes, and the wider boundaries between rural districts, urban districts, and municipal and county boroughs. Do inspect the Reference Box when using the second and third maps to understand the colour key and the different boundary types.
- GENUKI lists 19 family history and genealogical societies. There is no guarantee of the continuing existence of any of the societies and the individual websites may or may not be up to date.
- 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.
- Rootsweb mailing lists still have entries for the county, for Merseyside, and for individual towns and cities. The Lancashire Rootsweb page includes a list of webpages produced by family historians with connections in the county. Some of these pages may no longer exist.
- Deceased Online has nearly 5 million records for 60+ cemeteries and crematoria in Lancashire and Greater Manchester available on the website. Wyre Council's four cemeteries are located in Fleetwood, Poulton le Fylde and Preesall added Aug 2015. They provide information going back to 1840, digital scans (or computerised versions) of original burial registers, details of all grave occupants in each cemetery, maps indicating the section in each cemetery for all graves
- Victoria County History - Lancaster from British History Online (Victoria County Histories), published in book form in the early years of the 20th century. The online Victoria County Histories for Lancashire appear to be complete with 7 volumes (starting at #2). The early volumes of this series (including Volume 1: Natural History to Feudal Baronage) are also online courtesy of the Open Library References to specific parishes will be added to individual place pages in WeRelate as time permits.
Definitions
- See the Wikipedia articles on parishes and civil parishes for descriptions of this lowest rung of local administration. The original parishes (known as ancient parishes) were ecclesiastical, under the jurisdiction of the local priest and his bishop. 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 that never became independent civil parishes, have been redirected into the parish in which they are located. The names of these smaller places are italicized within the text.
- Rural districts were groups of geographically close civil parishes in existence between 1894 and 1974. They were formed as a middle layer of administration between the county and the civil parish. Inspecting the archives of a rural district will not be of much help to the genealogist or family historian, unless there is need to study land records in depth.
- Registration districts were responsible for civil registration or vital statistics and census records. The boundaries of these districts were revised from time to time depending on population density and local government organization. To ascertain the registration district to which a parish belonged in the timeframe in question, see Registration Districts in Cheshire, part of the UK_BMD website.
Helpful Sources
- Cheshire Archives and Local Studies are the local keepers of historical material for the county. But archives for places that were absorbed into Greater Manchester and Merseyside in 1974 may have been moved to the archive centres for the metropolitan county concerned.
- FamilySearch Cheshire 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).
- The GENUKI pages on Cheshire and its parishes point to many other sources of information on places within the county. The many small parishes and townships that existed before 1866 are treated individually as well as the larger towns and conurbations. The GENUKI pages for individual parishes now include a map of the parish and its surrounding area.
- A Vision of Britain through Time also has summaries and lists of statistics for each parish, but its organization is not for the beginning family historian in a hurry.
- The pay websites Ancestry and FindMyPast have a number of county-wide collections of censuses, Church of England baptisms, marriages and burials (some from the 1500s), and some providing microfilm copies of the manuscript entries. An international subscription is necessary to access Ancestry's UK holdings.
- A book entitled The history of the county palatine and city of Chester with the subtitle "compiled from original evidences in public offices, the Harleian and Cottonian mss., parochial registers, private muniments, unpublished ms. collections of successive Cheshire antiquaries, and a personal survey of every township in the county, incorporated with a re-publication of King's Vale royal and Leycester's Cheshire antiquities" by George Ormerod and others was published in 1819. It has been quoted by WR users interested in families traced before 1600. It is available online as images of the original pages at the Open Library (Google Books) as Vol I, Vol II and Vol III.
- Unfortunately, the Institute of Historical Research only includes two volumes of the Victoria County History for Cheshire on their website and these only cover the City of Chester. There may be other volumes to this series in print, but a Google Search does not indicate any further volumes online.
Maps
- Cheshire Archives and Local Studies have organized a facility to compare tithe maps circa 1830 and 19th century Ordnance Survey maps with the modern Ordnance Survey. These are available for every civil parish. A knob in the centre of the screen allows the user to move back and forth between the old and the new view. Use the key on the left to show other possibilities including land ownership.
- The diagrammatical map of Sanitary Districts in Cheshire showing Civil Parishes 1888 produced by the Ordnance Survey and provided by A Vision of Britain through Time is helpful. "Sanitary Districts" were the predecessors of rural districts and usually followed the same boundaries.
- The Ordnance Survey map of Cheshire circa 1900 supplied by A Vision of Britain through Time shows invidual settlements as well as parishes. There were significant administrative changes in the decade 1890-1900 that have led to some civil parishes absorbed into adjacent urban districts being omitted from this map.
- A Vision of Britain through Time provides a series of maps from the Ordnance Survey illustrating the towns and villages of Cheshire and also the borders between parishes. The following group of maps provide views of the county at various dates, illustrating the changes in administrative structure.
- The southern part of Cheshire in the 1830s as far north as Nantwich and Crewe on the east and Coddington on the west.
- The Wirral Peninsula in the 1830s
- The whole of Cheshire in 1888 with Sanitary Districts and 19th century civil parishes outlined
- The entire county in 1900 with Rural and Urban Districts. This map locates village, hamlets, churches, roads, railways, canals, industrial sites, manorial estates, etc. Unfortunately the copy of the map available online has been annotated in pencil, making some parishes difficult to inspect.
- 1931-1944 The county, with the numerous revisions to Rural and Urban Districts which occurred in the 1930s. This map locates village and hamlets, but they are more easily seen on the map of 1900.
- For a close-up view of an area as it looked in the 19th century, try the National Library of Scotland provision. The maps include the Ordnance Survey (OS) 25-inch to the mile series for England and Wales for the period 1841-1952. Country estates and factory buildings on the edge of towns are labelled; roads, railways, rivers and canals are shown.
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