Place:Brentor, Devon, England

the following text is based on an article in Wikipedia Brentor (#3 on map) is a village in the West Devon, England. Its population in the UK census of 2001 was 423 in an area of 3,560 acres (1441 hectares or 5.56 sq mi), a density of 81.5 per sq mi. The village is dominated by the hill of Brent Tor, topped by the village's church. The village used to be part of Tavistock Hundred. Brentor railway station served the village. Burnville House (or Farm) was built in about 1800 and is listed on the English Heritage Register. The following description from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1870-72 is provided by the website A Vision of Britain Through Time (University of Portsmouth Department of Geography). "BRENT-TOR, or Brentor, a parish in Tavistock [registration] district, Devon; on the river Lid, 4 miles N by W of Tavistock [railway] station. Post Town, Tavistock. Acres: 1,212. Real property: £832. Population: 128. Houses: 28. The manor belonged formerly to the Abbey of Tavistock; and belongs now to the Duke of Bedford. "A remarkable eminence here, bearing the same name as the parish, starts abruptly from an elevated down; has an altitude of 1,100 feet; is seen at a great distance; and serves as a mark for vessels entering Plymouth harbour. Its form is conical; its surface, rocky; and its mineral structure, a subject of much discussion among geologists. A mine of manganese was long worked; but has been abandoned. "The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Exeter. Value: £60. Patron: the Duke of Bedford. The church surmounts a precipice on the crown of the Tor; is a curious weather-worn structure, 37 feet by 14½; and is said to have been built by a merchant who, overtaken by a storm at sea, vowed to erect a church on the first point of land he saw."

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.)