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- source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names
- source: Family History Library Catalog
- the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia
Dedham is a village and parish within the Borough of Colchester in northeast Essex, England, on the River Stour and the border of Essex and Suffolk. The nearest town to Dedham is the small market town of Manningtree. The population of the parish at the 2011 UK Census was 1,907.
Formerly a rich wool town and market town, Dedham is now a flourishing commercial village, with a post office and various other shops. Agriculture is also important with mainly arable land (sugar beet and wheat) but also cattle grazing on the water meadows and some sheep on Grove Hill.
Dedham is frequently rated as containing some of England's most beautiful lowland landscape, most particularly the water meadows of the River Stour, which passes along the northern boundary of the village forming the boundary between Essex and Suffolk. Dedham has a central nuclear settlement around the church and the junction of Mill Lane and the High Street (part of the B1029). Connected to Dedham are the hamlets of The Heath and Lamb Corner. The village forms a key part of the Dedham Vale.
John Constable
Dedham is at the heart of 'Constable Country' – the area of England where John Constable (11 June 1776 – 31 March 1837) lived and painted. Constable attended the town's Grammar School (now the 'Old Grammar School' and 'Well House'), and he would walk to school each morning alongside the River Stour from his family's home in East Bergholt. Many of Constable's paintings feature Dedham, including Dedham Mill, which his father owned, and Dedham Parish Church, whose massive Caen stone and flint tower is a focal point of the surrounding Dedham Vale.
Dedham Settlers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony
A group of early dissenters left Dedham to found the township of Dedham in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635. Under the leadership of John Rogers (c. 1570–1636), a preacher banned from his work in England, they established a settlement on the western edge of the colony first established in 1628, now a suburb of the city of Boston. Despite some early setbacks this township eventually proved very successful and a number of prominent US families can trace their ancestry from these early arrivals from East Anglia.
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).
- DEDHAM, a village, a parish, and a sub-district, in Lexden [registration] district, Essex. The village stands on the river Stour, in a fine valley, at the boundary with Suffolk, 2¾ miles N of Ardleigh [railway] station, and 3½ W by N of Manningtree; consists chiefly of one street; and has a post office under Colchester, and a fair on Easter Tuesday.
- It was mentioned at Domesday; had a great clothing trade in the time of Richard II.; and was long a market-town. The parish comprises 2,551 acres. Real property: £8,349. Population: 1,734. Houses: 402. The property is much subdivided. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Rochester. Value: £170. Patron: the Duchy of Lancaster. The church is later English, with a fine tower; and was restored in 1862.
- A lectureship rectory, endowed by Burkitt, the commentator, is a separate benefice. Value: £430. Patron: the Governor of the grammar-school. There is an Independent chapel. The grammar school was founded in 1571, and rebuilt in 1868; and it has £254 from endowment for ordinary uses, and £55 for exhibitions at St. John's college, Cambridge. Another school has £18. Dunton's alms-houses have £91; and other charities have £108.
Research Tips
- Essex Record Office handles Essex archives within the county. The address is Wharf Road, Chelmsford, Essex CM2 6YT.
- The Essex Society for Family History covers topics of genealogical interest throughout the present County of Essex (i.e. excluding the western area now in Greater London). Subscription necessary.
- GENUKI provides a list of towns and parishes leading to pages for individual parishes with useful local information for genealogists and family historians.
- Wikimedia Commons has a set of maps of the old hundreds of Essex. These do not show the individual parishes within the hundreds.
- For very detailed investigation Wikimedia Commons also has a series of 176 part maps of the Ordnance Survey 1st series 1:10560, Map of Essex
- FamilySearch lists its collections of church records and vital records along with those provided by other organizations, both commercial and voluntary.
- The commercial website FindMyPast also has a collection of wills and newspaper transcriptions, as well as the "1939 Register" (an equivalent to the census gathered at the beginning of World War 2).
- A Vision of Britain through Time is a website produced by the Department of Geography of the University of Portsmouth. It outlines all parishes as they were in the 19th century.
- British History Online has transcribed eight volumes of the Victoria County History project for Essex. Seven of these cover the history of parts of the county in great detail, although the project is incomplete for Essex as a whole. Ownership of land through the centuries can often be traced here. The volumes of note are as follows:
- Volume 4, Ongar Hundred, including Chipping and High Ongar, Chigwell, Stondon Massey and Theydon Bois (26 parishes in all).
- Volume 5, Becontree Hundred outside Greater London. A thematic account of the growth of metropolitan Essex since 1850. Also contains topographical accounts of Barking, Ilford, Dagenham and other areas of Essex now within Greater London.
- Volume 6, parishes of Becontree Hundred now within the London boroughs of Newham, Waltham Forest and Redbridge. These include West and East Ham, Walthamstow and Wanstead.
- Volume 7, Covers the ancient parishes, formerly within the Liberty of Havering-atte-Bower and now within the London borough of Havering, and those in Chafford hundred in western Essex now bordering London. It includes accounts of Hornchurch, Romford, Havering.
- Volume 8, accounts of the parishes of Chafford and Harlow Hundreds, including Brentwood, Harlow and Thurrock.
- Volume 9, the Borough of Colchester, describes the life of the oldest and for long the largest town in Essex from the Iron Age to 1990.
- Volume 10, Lexden Hundred (part), includes Dedham, Earls Colne and Wivenhoe and other parishes to the north and west of Colchester.
- As of June 2019 Ancestry (Worldwide subscription required) includes Essex, England, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1538-1812, these early records are from parish registers of baptisms and burials during the years 1538–1812, and marriages during the years 1538-1754. These are in addition to their previous holdings:
- Essex, England, Church of England Births and Baptisms, 1813-1918: 3,937,941 records
- Essex, England, Church of England Marriages, 1754-1935: 1,968,439 records
- Essex, England, Church of England Deaths and Burials, 1813-1994: 730,118 records
- A map illustrating Dedham's relationship to its surrounding parishes may be found on the page describing Lexden and Winstree Rural District of which it was part between 1894 and 1974. It is marked as #7 on the map.
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