Place:Ellesmere, Shropshire, England

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

source: Family History Library Catalog

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

Ellesmere is a market town near Oswestry in north Shropshire, England, notable for its proximity to a number of prominent lakes known as the Meres. The town is located by the side of 'the Mere', one of the largest natural meres in England outside the Lake District and one of nine glacial meres in the area. ('glacial' means that the depression occupied by the mere was the location of a block of ice that persisted at the end of the last Ice Age). These meres are different from those in the Lake District in that they do not have a flow of water into them to maintain the level.

The civil parish which constitutes the town is Ellesmere Urban; the surrounding parish, covering a large rural area, is Ellesmere Rural Parish. Ellesmere Urban was an urban district until this term was withdrawn in 1974. The population of the town at the UK census of 2011 was 3,835.

The A495 and A528 roads cross at Ellesmere. The latter runs 15 miles south-southeast from Ellesmere to the county town, Shrewsbury.

The town lies beside the Llangollen Canal with a short side arm reaching the town centre wharf. The canal eventually terminates just outside Llangollen at Llantysilio. It was originally known as the Ellesmere Canal. Thomas Telford was overall director of its construction. Work lasted from 1793 to 1805 with the aim of linking Chester on the River Dee and Ellesmere Port on the River Mersey with Shrewsbury, but it never got that far due to rising costs and completion of alternative routes which later became the Shropshire Union Canal. During its construction, Telford lived in a house next to the canal in Ellesmere, which still stands today. Ellesmere Port was named after the town of Ellesmere.

Ellesmere no longer has a railway, but it was once on the Oswestry, Ellesmere and Whitchurch Railway main line of the Cambrian Railways.

Early History of Ellesmere

Wikipedia has a section on the ownership of the manor of Ellesmere from 1100 to 1500. Many of the people named in the Wikipedia article are listed here in WeRelate.

Research Tips

• The historical short form for Shropshire was "Salop". This is quite often found in archive material.
• Shropshire Archives, Castle Gates, Shrewsbury SY1 2AQ
• Shropshire Family History Society.
• The GENUKI main page for Shropshire provides information on various topics covering the whole of the county, and there is also a link to a list of parishes. Under each parish there is a list of the settlements within it and brief description of each. This is a list of pre-1834 ancient or ecclesiastical parishes but there are suggestions as to how to find parishes set up since then.
• GENUKI also provides transcriptions of parish registers for numerous parishes throughout Shropshire. These will be noted at the bottom of this list as time permits for the parishes involved. Each register is preceded by historical notes from the editor-transciber and other details than simply births, marriages and deaths that have been found in the individual books from the parishes. These registers probably only go up to 1812 when the proscribed style for registers across the country was altered.
• GENUKI lists under each parish further references to other organizations who hold genealogical information for the local area. (URLs for these other websites may not be up to date.)
• The FamilyTree Wiki has a series of pages similar to those provided by GENUKI which may have been prepared at a later date and from more recent data. The wiki has a link to English Jurisdictions 1851. There is a list of all the parishes in existence in 1851 with maps indicating their boundaries. The website is very useful for finding the ecclesiastical individual parishes within large cities and towns.
• A Vision of Britain through Time, Shropshire, section "Units and Statistics" leads to analyses of population and organization of the county from about 1800 through 1974. There are similar pages available for all civil parishes, municipal boroughs and other administrative divisions that existed pre-1974. Descriptions provided are usually based on a gazetteer of 1870-72 which often provides brief notes on the economic basis of the settlement and significant occurences through its history.
• The two maps below indicate the boundaries between parishes, etc., but for a more detailed view of a specific area try a map from this selection. The oldest series are very clear at the third magnification offered. Comparing the map details with the GENUKI details for the same area is well worthwhile.

• Map of Shropshire illustrating urban and rural districts in 1900 produced by UK Ordnance Survey and provided online by A Vision of Britain through Time. Parish boundaries and settlements within parishes are shown. (Unfortunately the online copy of this map has pencil codings in each parish which make it difficult to see the orignal.)
• Map of Shropshire urban and rural districts in 1944 produced by UK Ordnance Survey and provided online by A Vision of Britain through Time. Parish boundaries and settlements within parishes are shown. This is not a repeat of the first map. There were a number of changes to urban and rural district structure in the 1930s.

• A map of the ancient divisions named "hundreds" is to be found in A Vision of Britain through Time. Some of the hundreds were broken into separate sections with other hundreds in between.
• The website British History Online provides four volumes of the Victoria County History Series on Shropshire. Volume 2 covers the religious houses of the county; Volume 4 provides a history of agriculture across the county, and Volumes 10 and 11 deal with Munslow Hundred, the Borough of Wenlock and the Telford area (i.e., the northeastern part of the county). The rest of the county is not presently covered. References to individual parishes will be furnished as time permits.
• A transcription of the registers of Ellesmere Independent Chapel is online and is provided through the auspices of GENUKI. Transciptions of the Ellesmere Church of England parish registers are not available in this collection.