Place:Halewood, Lancashire, England

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

source: Family History Library Catalog

the following text is based on an article in Wikipedia Halewood (#5 on the map) is a town in the Metropolitan Borough of Knowsley in Merseyside, England. It lies near the southeastern boundary of the City of Liverpool, bordered by the its suburbs of Hunt's Cross and Much Woolton. Prior to 1974 Halewood was (like the rest of Liverpool) located in Lancashire, England. Halewood was one of the townships of the ancient parish of Childwall in West Derby Hundred. It became a civil parish in 1866 and was part of Whiston Rural District from 1894 until 1974. In 1920 the settlement of Hale Bank and a surrounding area of 673 acres was transferred to Widnes Municipal Borough to the east. The remainder of Halewood joined Knowsley in 1974. At the 2001 Census, the combined population of Halewood's four local government wards was 29,217. Halewood is home to the Jaguar Land Rover Body & Assembly facility, which produces some Land Rover models, and until December 2009, the Jaguar X-Type. Jaguar is Halewood's largest employer. On the same site is a large factory owned by another firm which produces gearboxes for Ford and Land Rover models. For more information, see the EN Wikipedia article Halewood.

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 Halewood from British History Online (Victoria County Histories), published 1907