Place:Stockport, Cheshire, England

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia Stockport is now a large town in Greater Manchester, England. It lies on elevated ground 7 miles (11 km) southeast of Manchester city centre, at the point where the rivers Goyt and Tame merge to create the River Mersey. Stockport is the largest settlement in the metropolitan borough of the same name. As of the 2001 Census the town had a population of 136,082 and the wider borough 284,528. The present borough of Stockport is located on both sides of the Mersey. Before 1974 the southern and larger part was in Cheshire, and the area to the north of the Mersey was in Lancashire. Stockport became a county borough in 1889 and was enlarged by gaining territory from Lancashire, including in 1906 Reddish and in 1913, the "Four Heatons". (The Four Heatons is the name used to describe the four individual neighbourhoods of Heaton Norris, Heaton Moor, Heaton Chapel, Heaton Mersey (latter three redirected to Heaton Norris). Collectively, they form a suburban area of Stockport.) Between 1894 and 1974 also Stockport absorbed a number of areas in surrounding Cheshire. The urban districts shown on the map were absorbed piecemeal during the County Borough era, with remaining area being absorbed into the Metropolitan Borough upon its formation in 1974.

Industrial History

Stockport in the 16th century was a small town entirely on the south bank of the Mersey, and known for the cultivation of hemp and rope manufacture. In the 18th century the town had one of the first mechanised silk factories in the British Isles. However, Stockport's predominant industries of the 19th century were the cotton and allied industries. Stockport was also at the centre of the country's hatting industry, which by 1884 was exporting more than six million hats a year; the last hat works in Stockport closed in 1997.

For more information, see the EN Wikipedia article Stockport. Includes a long discussion of the hatting industry.

A Vision of Britain through Time provides descriptions of Stockport by John Bartholomew in 1887 and a very long one by John Marius Wilson in 1871-2. Dominating the western approaches to the town is the Stockport Viaduct. Built in 1840, the viaduct's 27 brick arches carry the mainline railways from Manchester to Birmingham and London over the River Mersey. This structure featured as the background in many paintings by L. S. Lowry.

Earlier Administrative History

GENUKI provides the following information

Stockport was a township and borough in Stockport ancient parish, in Macclesfield Hundred which became a civil parish in 1866. Within the original township were the hamlets of Barlowfold, Cale Green, Carr Green, Daw Bank, Great Moor, Heaviley, Hempshaw Brook, Hillgate, Hope Hill, Little Moor and Shaw Heath. Brinksway has been redirected to Cheadle. The population of Stockport was 14,830 in 1801, 30,589 in 1851, 78,897 in 1901 and 141,650 in 1951.

The ancient parish church for the township of Stockport was dedicated to St. Mary the Virgin. There were other chuches in extistence before 1850, including a Roman Catholic church, a Friends Meeting House, and an independent Protestant congregation.

On the map below, the townships of Stockport are shown in pink. Those left uncoloured were parts of other ancient parishes. Brinnington (B), Offerton (O) and Norbury (near Stockport) disappeared in the reorganization of 1894.

Townships of the ancient parish

Bramhall Bredbury Brinnington Compstall Disley Dukinfield Hyde Marple Norbury (near Stockport) (later Hazel Grove) Offerton Romiley Stockport Etchells Torkington

Research Tips

Definitions

• 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 and his bishop. 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 that never became independent civil parishes, 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.
• Registration districts were responsible for civil registration or vital statistics and census records. The boundaries of these districts were revised from time to time depending on population density and local government organization. To ascertain the registration district to which a parish belonged in the timeframe in question, see Registration Districts in Cheshire, part of the UK_BMD website.

Helpful Sources

• Cheshire Archives and Local Studies are the local keepers of historical material for the county. But archives for places that were absorbed into Greater Manchester and Merseyside in 1974 may have been moved to the archive centres for the metropolitan county concerned.
• FamilySearch Cheshire 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).
• The GENUKI pages on Cheshire and its parishes point to many other sources of information on places within the county. The many small parishes and townships that existed before 1866 are treated individually as well as the larger towns and conurbations. The GENUKI pages for individual parishes now include a map of the parish and its surrounding area.
• A Vision of Britain through Time also has summaries and lists of statistics for each parish, but its organization is not for the beginning family historian in a hurry.
• The pay websites Ancestry and FindMyPast have a number of county-wide collections of censuses, Church of England baptisms, marriages and burials (some from the 1500s), and some providing microfilm copies of the manuscript entries. An international subscription is necessary to access Ancestry's UK holdings.
• A book entitled The history of the county palatine and city of Chester with the subtitle "compiled from original evidences in public offices, the Harleian and Cottonian mss., parochial registers, private muniments, unpublished ms. collections of successive Cheshire antiquaries, and a personal survey of every township in the county, incorporated with a re-publication of King's Vale royal and Leycester's Cheshire antiquities" by George Ormerod and others was published in 1819. It has been quoted by WR users interested in families traced before 1600. It is available online as images of the original pages at the Open Library (Google Books) as Vol I, Vol II and Vol III.
• Unfortunately, the Institute of Historical Research only includes two volumes of the Victoria County History for Cheshire on their website and these only cover the City of Chester. There may be other volumes to this series in print, but a Google Search does not indicate any further volumes online.

Maps

• Cheshire Archives and Local Studies have organized a facility to compare tithe maps circa 1830 and 19th century Ordnance Survey maps with the modern Ordnance Survey. These are available for every civil parish. A knob in the centre of the screen allows the user to move back and forth between the old and the new view. Use the key on the left to show other possibilities including land ownership.
• The diagrammatical map of Sanitary Districts in Cheshire showing Civil Parishes 1888 produced by the Ordnance Survey and provided by A Vision of Britain through Time is helpful. "Sanitary Districts" were the predecessors of rural districts and usually followed the same boundaries.
• The Ordnance Survey map of Cheshire circa 1900 supplied by A Vision of Britain through Time shows invidual settlements as well as parishes. There were significant administrative changes in the decade 1890-1900 that have led to some civil parishes absorbed into adjacent urban districts being omitted from this map.
• A Vision of Britain through Time provides a series of maps from the Ordnance Survey illustrating the towns and villages of Cheshire and also the borders between parishes. The following group of maps provide views of the county at various dates, illustrating the changes in administrative structure.

• The southern part of Cheshire in the 1830s as far north as Nantwich and Crewe on the east and Coddington on the west.
• The Wirral Peninsula in the 1830s
• The whole of Cheshire in 1888 with Sanitary Districts and 19th century civil parishes outlined
• The entire county in 1900 with Rural and Urban Districts. This map locates village, hamlets, churches, roads, railways, canals, industrial sites, manorial estates, etc. Unfortunately the copy of the map available online has been annotated in pencil, making some parishes difficult to inspect.
• 1931-1944 The county, with the numerous revisions to Rural and Urban Districts which occurred in the 1930s. This map locates village and hamlets, but they are more easily seen on the map of 1900.

• For a close-up view of an area as it looked in the 19th century, try the National Library of Scotland provision. The maps include the Ordnance Survey (OS) 25-inch to the mile series for England and Wales for the period 1841-1952. Country estates and factory buildings on the edge of towns are labelled; roads, railways, rivers and canals are shown.
• Because Stockport is now in Greater Manchester, it is worthwhile to inspect the holdings of Manchester Local Archives as well of those for Chester. There may well be copies of microfilms in both places.