Place:Bourne End, Buckinghamshire, England

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Bourne End is a village mostly in the parish of Wooburn, but partly in that of Little Marlow in Buckinghamshire, England. It is about five miles (8 km) south-east of High Wycombe and three miles (5 km) east of Marlow, near the boundary with Berkshire and close to where the Buckinghamshire River Wye empties into the Thames.

History

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Bourne End's original location differed from today's established village centre, and was a half-mile downstream on the River Thames. The name refers to the end of the river (bourne being an obsolete term for river), and derived from the mouth of the River Wye. Then a hamlet, it appears on Morden's 1722 map of Buckinghamshire as "Born end". It was noted in the 19th century, however, that the name had been corrupted to "Bone End", apparently through local mispronunciation and thence on official maps and documents. In 1858, the vicar of Wooburn succeeded in reversing the change, and the corrected name remains in use today.

The length of the River Wye was the provider of water power for many mills in the valley for hundreds of years, and Bourne End was no exception. There were four on the final stretch of the river: Princes Mill, Jacksons (or Gunpowder) Mill, Hedsor Mill and Lower Mill. These mills were historically the predominant employers in the area, along with the local farms and two wharfs on the Thames.

In the early nineteenth century, the settlement known as Bourne End was a hamlet of Wooburn parish, along with others such as Spring Gardens, Eghams Green, Cores End, Heavens Lea and Upper Bourne End. This changed with the emergence of the Wycombe Railway Company in 1846. By 1854, Isambard Kingdom Brunel had designed and constructed a railway linking Maidenhead to High Wycombe, via Bourne End. The station at Bourne End was originally named Marlow Road; then in 1873 a branch line to Marlow was built, and a year later the station was renamed Bourne End station to avoid confusion with the new station at Marlow town. The railway created more travel opportunities for locals and greatly benefited the mills, and thus Bourne End expanded, on a greater scale than other similar settlements in the surrounding area. See Marlow Branch Line and Marlow Donkey for more information.

The hamlets soon merged into what is now known as Bourne End, as did Well End and Coldmoorholme in the neighbouring parish of Little Marlow. Both a church and school were built at the turn of the century for the residents' convenience. The Parade became established as the focal point of the village for shops and services.

In the 1920s Bourne End became home for two distinguished literary figures; Enid Blyton, a perennially popular children's writer, moved into Old Thatch on Coldmoorholme Lane, and Edgar Wallace, a prolific crime author and dramatist, bought Chalklands off Blind Lane. Another resident at this time was Louis Blériot, the French aviator and aircraft builder, who lived at New York Lodge beside the Thames.

The Royalty Cinema opened in The Parade in 1934. The late 1940s saw extensive development in Bourne End, of the Chalklands estate and the Council Estate north of The Parade. The 1960s saw the building of the Community Centre and Library in Wakeman Road after some years of local campaigning.

The Beeching Axe hit the village in 1969, as it was announced that the line between Bourne End and High Wycombe, which had suffered reduced usage after the direct connection between Wycombe and London by the opening of the Great Western and Great Central Joint Railway in 1899, would be closed. The track bed was lifted soon after closure in 1970. A commercial estate was developed adjacent to the station, though most of the course taken by the railway remains as a footpath between the village and Wooburn.

Research Tips

Registration Offices

Birth, marriage and death certificates can now be ordered online from Buckinghamshire County Council. The full postal address is Buckinghamshire Register Office, County Hall, Walton Street, Aylesbury, HP20 1YU.

The Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies (County Hall, Walton Street, Aylesbury, HP20 1UU) holds

• Church of England and Nonconformist churches including registers of baptism, marriage and burial.
• Around 35,000 wills proved by the Archdeaconry of Buckingham.
• County and District Councils (lists of councillors, minutes of meetings, etc).
• Quarter and Petty Session courts.
• Landed estates of families including the Aubrey-Fletchers, Hampdens, Carringtons and Fremantles.
• Historic maps including OS, tithe and inclosure maps
• A wide range of local history books, some for loan.
• Pamphlets and articles of local history interest.
• Local newspapers
• Computers for access to family history resources like Ancestry and FreeBMD.
• Published material is listed in the Library Catalogue.
• Catalogues to some of our manuscript material is available through Access to Archives, part of The National Archives (TNA). Their database contains catalogues describing archives held locally in England and Wales and dating from the eighth century to the present day.

In Buckinghamshire, as with other counties in England and Wales, the location of offices where Births, Marriages and Deaths were registered has altered with other changes in local government. A list of the location of Registration Offices since civil registration began in 1837 has been prepared by GENUKI (Genealogy: United Kingdom and Ireland). The table also gives details of when each Registration Office was in existence. In the case of Buckinghamshire, the same registration offices were used for the censuses since 1851. Buckinghamshire now only has a central registration office at County Hall in Aylesbury, but there are facilities for registering births, marriages and deaths in specific libraries around the county.

Nineteenth Century Local Administration

English Jurisdictions is a webpage provided by FamilySearch which analyses every ecclesiastical parish in England at the year 1851. It provides, with the aid of outline maps, the date at which parish records and bishops transcripts begin, non-conformist denominations with a chapel within the parish, the names of the jurisdictions in charge: county, civil registration district, probate court, diocese, rural deanery, poor law union, hundred, church province; and links to FamilySearch historical records, FamilySearch Catalog and the FamilySearch Wiki. Two limitations: only England, and at the year 1851.

During the 19th century two bodies, the Poor Law Union and the Sanitary District, had responsibility for governmental functions at a level immediately above that covered by the civil parish. In 1894 these were replace by Rural and Urban Districts. These were elected bodies, responsible for setting local property assessments and taxes as well as for carrying out their specified duties. Thses districts continued in operation until 1974. Urban districts for larger municipalities were called "Municipal Boroughs" and had additional powers and obligations.

Poor Law Unions, established nationally in 1834, combined parishes together for the purpose of providing relief for the needy who had no family support. This led to the building of '"union poorhouses" or "workhouses" funded by all the parishes in the union. The geographical boundaries established for the individual Poor Law Unions were employed again when Registration Districts were formed three years later. In 1875 Sanitary Districts were formed to provide services such as clean water supply, sewage systems, street cleaning, and the clearance of slum housing. These also tended to follow the same geographical boundaries, although there were local alterations caused by changes in population distribution.

Online Historical References

• The Buckinghamshire section of The Victoria History of the Counties of England, in four volumes, is online and provides an extensive history of the county, parish by parish, up to the end of the 19th century. Parishes are arranged in their original "hundreds", a fairly archaic scheme of dividing counties into reasonably sized sections.

• GENUKI for Buckinghamshire provides a lot of material on the county history from a variety of aspects. The maps of the hundreds are reproduced from 19th century publications and show the topology as well as the locations of the various parishes. There is also a schematic map covering the whole county. GENUKI does not contain much information about the 20th century and beyond.

• Local History Online provides a list of local historical organizations. Each of these societies and organizations has its own website.

• The FamilySearch Wiki on Buckinghamshire explains the jurisdictions relating to civil affairs, parishes and probate (wills and testaments) for each parish in the county and also outlines when these jurisdictions were in existence. The data does not cover the post-1974 period.