Place:Butterworth, Lancashire, England

the following text is based on an article in Wikipedia Butterworth was a township occupying the southeastern part of the parish of Rochdale, in the hundred of Salford in Lancashire, England. It encompassed 12.1 square miles (31 km2) of land by the South Pennines which spanned the settlements of Belfield, Bleaked Gate cum Roughbank, Clegg, Firgrove, Haughs, Hollingworth, Lowhouse, Milnrow, Newhey, Ogden, Rakewood, Smithy Bridge, Tunshill and Wildhouse. All the settlements in italics are redirected to Milnrow. Butterworth Hall, Clegg Hall, Butterworth Moor and Clegg Moor were also within the bounds of Butterworth. Butterworth can be traced to the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain in the Early Middle Ages. Its land was divided into two classifications — Butterworth Freehold and Butterworth Lordship — referring to the ancient terms of tenure, some freehold, some of the Lord of the Manor by various rents and services. In 1830, Butterworth was recorded to have 5,554 inhabitants. By 1861 the population was 6,704. (Source:Wilson's Gazetteer in GENUKI and A Vision of Britain Through Time]) Milnrow, a chapelry along the River Beal, emerged as Butterworth's largest settlement during the Early Modern period, so much so that its name gradually supplanted that of Butterworth (as did Rochdale in the neighbouring township of Castleton. The Industrial Revolution and construction of the Rochdale Canal, combined with urbanisation, population shifts, and local government reforms contributed towards the dissolution of Butterworth in 1894; its social welfare functions were broadly superseded by the English Poor Laws and new units of local governance, such as the County Borough of Rochdale and the Milnrow Urban District. Today, the territory of the former township lies entirely within the Metropolitan Borough of Rochdale in Greater Manchester.

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