Place:Lynton, Devon, England

the following text is based on an article in Wikipedia Lynton is a small town and former urban district in Devon, England that is commonly coupled with its neighbour Lynmouth. Lynton is located on the northern edge of Exmoor and at the top of a gorge while Lynmouth is situated at the foot of the gorge. The towns are connected by the Lynton and Lynmouth Cliff Railway. Lynton was once the terminus for the narrow-gauge Lynton & Barnstaple Railway, which extended the rail service from Barnstaple. The two communities are governed at local level by Lynton and Lynmouth Town Council, but are both part of the North Devon District. Lynton was the name of the urban district which also covered Lynmouth from 1894 until 1974. The parish boundaries extend southwards from the coast and includes hamlets such as Barbrook and small moorland settlements such as East Ilkerton, West Ilkerton and Shallowford. (All re-directed here.) In Lynton is the Parish Church of St Mary, which stands overlooking the sea, surrounded by shops and hotels. The tower is mainly 13th century but the church itself has been enlarged and altered — most notably in 1741, when the nave was rebuilt, and later in Victorian times.

Lynmouth

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

Lynmouth is a village in Devon, England, which straddles the confluence of the West Lyn and East Lyn rivers, in a gorge below Lynton, to which it is connected by the Lynton and Lynmouth Cliff Railway.

Lynmouth was described by the portrait painter Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), who honeymooned there with his bride Margaret Burr, as "the most delightful place for a landscape painter this country can boast".

In August 1952 a serious flood occurred when the town was deluged by the runoff down the two rivers from 9 inches of rain falling in 24 hours. There were 34 fatalities and 100 buildings destroyed or badly damaged. (Source: Wikipedia). A Vision of Britain through Time provides a description from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of a similar storm which occurred in 1607.

For more information, see the EN Wikipedia article Lynton.

For more information, see the EN Wikipedia article Lynmouth.

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.)
• All the usual references for birth, marriage and death registrations, and for the censuses, will refer to Lynton or Lynton and Lynmouth, but not to Lynmouth independently.