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- source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names
- source: Family History Library Catalog
- the following text is based on an article in Wikipedia
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Whittle le Woods is a village and civil parish of the Borough of Chorley in Lancashire, England.
The village lies on the A6 major road, about three miles north of the town of Chorley, and to the south of the city of Preston. It is divided into two areas, the older part on the old coach road running through Waterhouse Green to Brindle and the more modern part on the A6 road where the church of St John is situated.
The name of this village comes from 'a white hill' with the 'le-woods' part added at a later date with a subsequent meaning 'A white hill in the woods'.
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Just over a mile to the east of the M61 motorway is the hamlet of Whittle Springs. The Leeds and Liverpool Canal passes a junction in the hamlet, where the south end of the Lancaster Canal formerly continued north to Walton Summit. This is also the start of a flight of locks called Johnson's Hillock Locks, which continue via Heapey and Wheelton in the direction of Blackburn.
Whittle had 2 large sandstone quarries on Hill Top Lane. Whittle Hill Quarry is one of the deepest quarries in the northwest of England. These were fed by the canal which took stone that had been excavated to Walton Summit and Wigan.
From 1894 until 1974 the parish was in Chorley Rural District. Prior to 1894 it was part of Leyland subdistrict of Chorley Registration District and Poor Law Union, and was a township in the ancient parish of Leyland in the Leyland Hundred.
Research Tips
- 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. 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 Whittle-le-Woods from British History Online (Victoria County Histories), published 1911
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