Place:Marple, Cheshire, England

Watchers
NameMarple
Alt namesHigh Lanesource: from redirect
Barns Foldsource: hamlet in parish
Hawk Greensource: hamlet in parish
High Lane in Marplesource: hamlet in parish
Marpleridgesource: hamlet in parish
Middlewoodsource: hamlet in parish
Ridge Endsource: hamlet in parish
Strinessource: hamlet in parish
Turf Leasource: hamlet in parish
Windlehurstsource: hamlet in parish
TypeTown, Urban district, Suburb
Coordinates53.4°N 2.05°W
Located inCheshire, England     ( - 1974)
See alsoStockport, Cheshire, Englandancient parish of which it was a township
Macclesfield Hundred, Cheshire, Englandhundred in which it was located
Mellor, Derbyshire, Englandparish absorbed into Marple in 1936
Ludworth, Derbyshire, Englandparish absorbed into Marple in 1936
Stockport (metropolitan borough), Greater Manchester, Englandmetropolitan borough into which it has been located since 1974
source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names
source: Family History Library Catalog
the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

Marple is a small town which since 1974 has been within the Metropolitan Borough of Stockport, in Greater Manchester, England where it is an unparished area. It lies on the River Goyt southeast of Stockport.

Between 1894 and 1974 Marple was an urban district located in the county of Cheshire. Marple had a population of 23,480 in the 2001 UK Census.

GENUKI provides the following information

Marple was a township and chapelry in Stockport ancient parish in Macclesfield Hundred which became a civil parish in 1866. The urban district established in 1894 was increased in size in 1936 by the addition of parts of the parishes of Bredbury, Romiley and Hazel Grove and Bramhall and by the complete parishes of Mellor and Ludworth which were transferred into Marple Urban District from Chapel-en-le-Frith Rural District in Derbyshire. The population was 2,031 in 1801, 3,558 in 1851, 5,505 in 1901, and 13,073 in 1951.

Marple includes the hamlets of Barns Fold, Hawk Green, High Lane in Marple, Marpleridge, Middlewood, Ridge End, Strines, Turf Lea and Windlehurst. High Lane is now a village or town of approximately 5,800 people.

Image:Stockport App Par rev 1900.png

History

the following text is based on an article in Wikipedia

Marple was predominantly within the Macclesfield Forest, and was omitted from the Domesday survey of 1086. The first mention of the area was in 1122 in a deed for the sale of land. In 1220 the land passed to the Vernon family where it remained for several generations.

Many pre-Industrial Revolution inhabitants of the village mostly worked on small farms, while others specialised in linen weaving and hatting. After 1790, Samuel Oldknow transformed much of this lifestyle, with the construction of lime kilns and mills. The Industrial Revolution had arrived, and the population of the village began to rise with the construction of terraces to house mill workers and the formation of a village centre filled with private businesses.

In the early 1800s the town prospered from the success of cotton production in nearby Stockport and Manchester, and the canals in the area served as a vital link with other industrial towns. The railway had arrived in the mid-1800s and this caused the demise of the canal as a transport link. With the opening of the railway commuting to Stockport and Manchester from the village was possible.

Research Tips

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.
  • 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.
This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at Marple, Greater Manchester. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with WeRelate, the content of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.