Place:Ottery St. Mary, Devon, England

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia Ottery St. Mary, known as "Ottery", is a large fairly rural civil parish of 10,000 acres in the East Devon District of Devon, England. It is on the River Otter, about 10 miles (16 km) east of Exeter and north of Sidmouth. At its core is the small town of Ottery St. Mary with its large cruciformed shape church which has been described as "a miniature Exeter Cathedral". (See Wikipedia for a detailed description.) At the 2001 UK census, the parish, which, in addition to the central town, includes the villages of Metcombe, Fairmile, Alfington, Tipton St. John, Wiggaton, and West Hill, had a population of 7,692. The population of the urban area alone at the 2011 UK census was 4,898. Including the adjacent civil parish of Aylesbeare (#2 on map), at the above census, the population was 9,022. Archaeological excavations in 2014 uncovered a medieval longhouse dating to AD.1250–1350. Ottery is first attested in the Domesday Book of 1086, where it appears as 'Otri' and 'Otrei'. 'Oteri Sancte Marie' is first mentioned in 1242. The town takes its name from the River Otter on which it stands, the river taking its name from the animal. The 'St Mary' element refers to the fact that the town belonged to the church of St Mary in Rouen in France in 1086. The town was the birthplace of the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), where his father, the Reverend John Coleridge, was a vicar. end of Wikipedia contribution Ottery St. Mary's history is sufficiently significant for the town to have also been a "hundred", one of the ancient divisions of the county. The parish was an urban district from 1894 until 1974.

A Vision of Britain through Time provides the following description of Ottery St. Mary from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1871-72:

"OTTERY-ST. MARY, a town, a parish, a [registration] sub-district, and a hundred, in Devon. The parish contains also the hamlets of Alphington, Fluxton, Tipton, and Wiggaton, and the tythings Alphington, Fluxton, Tipton, Wiggaton, Rill, Gosford, and Cadhay. Acres: 9,942. Real property: £17,806 Population in 1851: 4,421; in 1861: 4,340. Houses: 925. The hundred is conterminate with the parish."

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.)
• GENUKI provides many references for Ottery St. Mary
• The FamilySearch wiki on the ecclesiastical parish of Ottery St. Mary provides a list of useful resources for the local area.