Place:Wrightington, Lancashire, England

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia Wrightington is a civil parish that until 1974 was part of the Wigan Rural District in Lancashire, England. The area is now part of the Borough of West Lancashire. The parish has an area of 3,915½ acres. The surface is hilly, rising to over 400 ft. at Harrock on the border of Parbold, and then falling to the north, northeast and southeast. On the southern border, the boundary at Appley Bridge touches the River Douglas. The estate of Wrightington Hall is to the north of this point. Tunley and Broadhurst (other estates) lie to the north of the park, and Fairhurst, to the west of Harrock (another estate), reaches down to the River Douglas. At the 2001 UK census, Wrightington had a population of 4,055, falling to 2,886 at the 2011 UK census. (This drop may be due to a change in boundaries not mentioned in Wikipedia.)

Churches in Wrightington

In 1691, the first church in Wrightington was built. The curate, Jonathan Scholefield, ejected from Douglas Chapel in Parbold, in 1662 for his Puritan beliefs, found refuge at Tunley, where a group of Presbyterians started meeting regularly for worship at South Tunley Hall, the home of Thomas and Elizabeth Wilson. Twenty-two years after his death in 1667, the passing of the Toleration Act (1689) allowed dissenters to worship openly. For the free exercise of their Divine worship, Thomas Wilson of "Tunley within Wrightington " erected a chapel for Protestants dissenting from the Church of England. About a century later the congregation became Unitarian before the building was given to the Scottish Presbyterians. It now belongs to the Presbyterian Church of England. The original church building is believed to be the oldest building in England that was built as a Presbyterian church.

St. James the Great was built in 1857 by E. G. Paley for the services of the Church of England. In November 2000, to commemorate the millennium, a new stained glass window was added combining traditional imagery and contemporary elements. The church is set in lovely countryside, commanding views stretching from Southport to the Lake District. The central theme, the Nativity of Jesus, is surrounded by finely drawn landscapes and well known buildings from the surrounding area: the famous Wrightington Hospital, the church and the 400-year-old Heskin School.

Founded before 1893, the Carr House Lane Primitive Methodist Church was an early 19th century (1807) secession from the Wesleyan Methodist church. It was particularly successful in evangelising agricultural and industrial communities at open meetings. In 1932, the Primitive Methodists joined with the Wesleyan Methodists and the United Methodists to form the Methodist Church of Great Britain. The chapel is now closed.

Fairhurst Hall was at one time a place of worship for Roman Catholicism and a priest had been maintained at Wrightington Hall from the 1680s with a private chapel dedicated to St. Joseph was provided for the family, tenantry and employees until the building of St. Joseph's in 1892 by Charles Clifton Dicconson.

For more information, see the EN Wikipedia article Wrightington. There are articles on Wrightington Hall and its residents and on Peter Lathom's charity.

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 Wrightington from British History Online (Victoria County Histories), published 1911