Place:Haversham, Buckinghamshire, England

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

source: Family History Library Catalog

Haversham was part of the Newport Hundred and the Newport Pagnell Poor Law Union. The parish was located in the Newport Pagnell Rural District until 1934 when it was merged with Little Linford into Haversham-cum-Little Linford.

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Haversham is a village in the Borough of Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, England. It is situated just north of Milton Keynes near Wolverton and about north of Central Milton Keynes, in the green belt. Haversham-cum-Little Linford is a civil parish in the Borough of Milton Keynes.

The village name is an Old English word that means 'Haefer's homestead'. In the Domesday Book of 1086, when it belonged to the Peverell family, it was listed as Hæfærsham. The ancient manor house in the village, which was fortified in 1304, was largely burnt down, but parts of it still remain in a farm house just outside the main village.

Haversham was once a north Buckinghamshire farming village before the building of the railway carriage works at Wolverton in 1833. , only Hill Farm, Grange Farm, Field Farm and Crossroads Farm remain as active working farms. The village has two distinct settlements separated by farmland. The older part of the village contains the manor house and, at elevations between 60 metres and 65 metres above mean sea level, is close to the Ouse Valley and its flood plain. In the 1930s 'new Haversham' was built on the meadows just above the banks of the River Ouse to house managers working within the rail works at Wolverton. The modern part contains the primary school and is on ground at elevations between 65 metres and 75 metres, overlooking the Ouse Valley.

Behind Haversham lakes is the ruined church of St Peter's which belonged originally to the medieval village of Stanton Low, and which has for many years been associated with local werewolf legend. The last house in Stanton Low fell into disrepair in the 1920s. In the 1950s the Norman chancel arch from St Peter's was removed to St James' Church New Bradwell, and St Peters is now a ruin. In the 1970s, ARC dug the river meadows near the site of the old village of Stanton Low for gravel extraction, leaving behind the large man made lakes that surround Haversham to the south today. These lakes are the home to the Hanson Centre and to the Haversham Sailing Club, one of the leading sailing clubs around Milton Keynes.

Near to Haversham, along the Ouse towards Wolverton, is the Wolverton Railway Viaduct of a 'typical' Stephenson's design, carrying the West Coast Main Line over the river Great Ouse. A little further west is the 'Iron Trunk' canal aqueduct, carrying the Grand Union Canal over the same river. There are also 'cattle creep' holes in the canal embankment, which allow cows to pass from one side of the canal to the other: one of these is also used to carry the riverside footpath.

The village gave its name to HMS Haversham, a Ham class minesweeper.

Research Tips

Maps

• An outline map of the current civil parishes of Buckinghamshire (post 1974 and omitting Milton Keynes unitary authority) is provided by the Boundaries Commission.
• Another map which gives no source, appears to have been drawn to show the county in the late 19th century and labels the parishes directly. However, the map does not show towns and villages (unless they are parishes using the same name) and some parishes have been found to be missing from this map.
• A map provided by the Open University (a British university based in Milton Keynes) gives the locations of the old civil parishes and the new communities that make up Milton Keynes. It can be expanded to read the labels.

Registration Offices

Birth, marriage and death certificates can now be ordered online from Buckinghamshire County Council. The full postal address is Buckinghamshire Register Office, County Hall, Walton Street, Aylesbury, HP20 1YU.

The Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies (County Hall, Walton Street, Aylesbury, HP20 1UU) holds

• Church of England and Nonconformist churches including registers of baptism, marriage and burial.
• Around 35,000 wills proved by the Archdeaconry of Buckingham.
• County and District Councils (lists of councillors, minutes of meetings, etc).
• Quarter and Petty Session courts.
• Landed estates of families including the Aubrey-Fletchers, Hampdens, Carringtons and Fremantles.
• Historic maps including OS, tithe and inclosure maps
• A wide range of local history books, some for loan.
• Pamphlets and articles of local history interest.
• Local newspapers
• Computers for access to family history resources like Ancestry and FreeBMD.
• Published material is listed in the Library Catalogue.
• Catalogues to some of our manuscript material is available through Access to Archives, part of The National Archives (TNA). Their database contains catalogues describing archives held locally in England and Wales and dating from the eighth century to the present day.

In Buckinghamshire, as with other counties in England and Wales, the location of offices where Births, Marriages and Deaths were registered has altered with other changes in local government. A list of the location of Registration Offices since civil registration began in 1837 has been prepared by GENUKI (Genealogy: United Kingdom and Ireland). The table also gives details of when each Registration Office was in existence. In the case of Buckinghamshire, the same registration offices were used for the censuses since 1851.

Nineteenth Century Local Administration

English Jurisdictions is a webpage provided by FamilySearch which analyses every ecclesiastical parish in England at the year 1851. It provides, with the aid of outline maps, the date at which parish records and bishops transcripts begin, non-conformist denominations with a chapel within the parish, the names of the jurisdictions in charge: county, civil registration district, probate court, diocese, rural deanery, poor law union, hundred, church province; and links to FamilySearch historical records, FamilySearch Catalog and the FamilySearch Wiki. Two limitations: only England, and at the year 1851.

During the 19th century two bodies, the Poor Law Union and the Sanitary District, had responsibility for governmental functions at a level immediately above that covered by the civil parish. In 1894 these were replace by Rural and Urban Districts. These were elected bodies, responsible for setting local property assessments and taxes as well as for carrying out their specified duties. Thses districts continued in operation until 1974. Urban districts for larger municipalities were called "Municipal Boroughs" and had additional powers and obligations.

Poor Law Unions, established nationally in 1834, combined parishes together for the purpose of providing relief for the needy who had no family support. This led to the building of '"union poorhouses" or "workhouses" funded by all the parishes in the union. The geographical boundaries established for the individual Poor Law Unions were employed again when Registration Districts were formed three years later. In 1875 Sanitary Districts were formed to provide services such as clean water supply, sewage systems, street cleaning, and the clearance of slum housing. These also tended to follow the same geographical boundaries, although there were local alterations caused by changes in population distribution.

Online Historical References

• The Buckinghamshire section of The Victoria History of the Counties of England, in four volumes, is online and provides an extensive history of the county, parish by parish, up to the end of the 19th century. Parishes are arranged in their original "hundreds", a fairly archaic scheme of dividing counties into reasonably sized sections.

• GENUKI for Buckinghamshire provides a lot of material on the county history from a variety of aspects. The maps of the hundreds are reproduced from 19th century publications and show the topology as well as the locations of the various parishes. There is also a schematic map covering the whole county. GENUKI does not contain much information about the 20th century and beyond.

• Local History Online provides a list of local historical organizations. Each of these societies and organizations has its own website.

• The FamilySearch Wiki on Buckinghamshire explains the jurisdictions relating to civil affairs, parishes and probate (wills and testaments) for each parish in the county and also outlines when these jurisdictions were in existence. The data does not cover the post-1974 period.