Place:Widecombe in the Moor, Devon, England

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

Widecombe in the Moor (#30 on map) is a village and large civil parish on Dartmoor in Devon, England. Its church is known as the Cathedral of the Moors on account of its tall spire and its size, relative to the small population it serves. It is a favourite tourist centre, partly for its scenic character and partly for its connection to the popular song “Widecombe Fair”.

According to Widecombe's official website, there are 196 households in the village, but dozens of isolated cottages and moorland farms are spread across the large and sprawling parish covering 10,786 acres (4,364 hectares or 16.85 sq mi). The parish is surrounded, clockwise from the north, by the parishes of Manaton (#21), Ilsington (#15), Ashburton (#2), Buckland in the Moor (#7), Holne (formerly in Totnes Rural District) and the modern parish of Dartmoor Forest. A Vision of Britain through Time provides the following description of Widecombe from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1871-72: "WIDECOMBE-IN-THE-MOOR, a parish, with four hamlets, in Newton-Abbot [registration] district, Devon; in the E side of Dartmoor, 8 miles SSW of Moreton-Hampstead [railway] station. Post town, Ashburton, under Newton-Abbot. Acres: 10,614. Real property: £4,771. Population in 1851: 974; in 1861: 854. Houses: 163. The property is much subdivided. "The surface exhibits the characteristic features of Dartmoor; and has many bold and lofty rocks. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Exeter. Value: £268. Patrons: the Dean and Chapter of E. The church is old but good; has a very fine tower; and was the scene of a great disaster by lightning on a Sunday in 1638, when 4 persons in it were killed and 62 injured. The vicarage of Lensden is a separate benefice. There are Independent and Wesleyan chapels and a charity school." The names of the four hamlets have not been given but a high definition map showed Bonehill, Grandon, Lensden and Poundsgate.

Research Tips

(revised Jul 2021)

• Ordnance Survey Map of Devonshire North and Devonshire South are large-scale maps covering the whole of Devon between them. They show the parish boundaries when Rural Districts were still in existence and before the mergers of parishes that took place in 1935 and 1974. When expanded the maps can show many of the small villages and hamlets inside the parishes. These maps are now downloadable for personal use but they can take up a lot of computer memory.
• GENUKI has a selection of maps showing the boundaries of parishes in the 19th century. The contribution from "Know Your Place" on Devon is a huge website yet to be discovered in detail by this contributor.

• Devon has three repositories for hands-on investigation of county records. Each has a website which holds their catalog of registers and other documents.

• the Devon Heritage Centre at Exeter
• the Northern Record Office at Barnstaple
• the Plymouth and West Devon Record Office at Plymouth which is independent of the other two.

• There is, however, a proviso regarding early records for Devon. Exeter was badly hit in a "blitz" during World War II and the City Library, which then held the county archives, was burnt out. About a million books and historic documents went up in smoke. While equivalent records--particularly wills--are quite easy to come by for other English counties, some records for Devon and surrounding counties do not exist.

• Devon Family History Society Mailing address: PO Box 9, Exeter, EX2 6YP, United Kingdom. The society has branches in various parts of the county. It is the largest Family History Society in the United Kingdom. The website has a handy guide to each of the parishes in the county and publishes the registers for each of the Devon dioceses on CDs.

• This is the home page to the GENUKI Devon website. It has been updated since 2015 and includes a lot of useful information on each parish.
• Devon has a Online Parish Clerk (OPC) Project which can be reached through GENUKI. Only about half of the parishes have a volunteer contributing local data. For more information, consult the website, especially the list at the bottom of the homepage.

• The FamilySearch Wiki provides a similar information service to GENUKI. An index of parishes leads to notes and references for each parish.

• Brett Langston's list of Devon Registration Districts and parishes within each registration district from 1837 to the present can indicate where to find details of civil registration entries since the process began in England.

• Magna Britannia, Volume 6 by Daniel Lysons and Samuel Lysons. A general and parochial history of the county. Originally published by T Cadell and W Davies, London, 1822, and placed online by British History Online. This is a volume of more than 500 pages of the history of Devon, parish by parish. It is 100 years older than the Victoria County Histories available for some other counties, but equally thorough in its coverage. Contains information that may have been swept under the carpet in more modern works.

• There is a cornucopia of county resources at Devon Heritage. Topics are: Architecture, Census, Devon County, the Devonshire Regiment, Directory Listings, Education, Genealogy, History, Industry, Parish Records, People, Places, Transportation, War Memorials. There are fascinating resources you would never guess that existed from those topic titles. (NOTE: There may be problems reaching this site. One popular browser provider has put a block on it. This may be temporary, or it may be its similarity in name to the Devon Heritage Centre at Exeter.)