Place:Ivybridge, Devon, England

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia Ivybridge (#9 on map) is a small town and civil parish in the South Hams, in Devon, England. It lies about 9 miles (14.5 km) east of Plymouth. It is at the southern extremity of Dartmoor, a National Park of England and Wales and lies along the A38 "Devon Expressway" road. Mentioned in documents as early as the 13th century, Ivybridge's early history is marked by its status as an important crossing-point over the River Erme on the Exeter-to-Plymouth route. In the 16th century mills were built using the River Erme's power. The parish of St. John was formed in 1836. The name was changed to Ivybridge which became a civil parish in 1894 and a town in 1977. The early urbanisation and development of Ivybridge largely coincided with the Industrial Revolution. Stowford Paper Mill was built in 1787 and rebuilt again in the 1860s with extensive investment. In 1848 the railway arrived on the northern edge of the village [South Devon Railway Company]. The paper mill closed in 2013 after 226 years in Ivybridge and the buildings are being converted to homes and shops. Although occasionally referred to as a dormitory town, many people work in the town itself, and agriculture continues to play an economic role for Ivybridge's hinterland. The area surrounding Ivybridge is almost completely farmland. While heavy industry diminished during the latter half of the 20th century, the population grew significantly from 1,574 people in 1921 to 12,056 in 2001, although it dropped to 11,851 by the 2011 UK census.

Ivybridge was originally in Ermington Hundred. The village covered parts of the ancient parishes of Ermington, Harford, and Ugborough parishes. (Source:Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1870-72). It became a civil parish and urban district in 1894. Its status of urban district ended in 1935 when it became part of Plympton St. Mary Rural District. Ivybridge became part of the South Hams District in 1974.

Before 1894 Ivybridge was made up of four neighbouring parishes: Harford – 2 miles (3.2 km) north; Ugborough – 2.5 miles (4.0 km) east; Ermington – 2 miles (3.2 km) south and Cornwood – 3 miles (4.8 km) northwest. All the parishes' boundaries met at the Ivy Bridge. In 1836 the ecclesiastical parish of St. John was formed (the name of the church at the time, which was named after John the Evangelist). The parish represented the small central area of Ivybridge known at present. In 1894 St John's parish became a parish church for the newly created civil parish of Ivybridge. Ivybridge became a town 83 years later in 1977. Its local government district has been the South Hams since 1 April 1974.

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.)
• Users studying the Plymouth area are recommended to check the GENUKI page for Plymouth which is lengthy but recently updated (summer 2015). Two entries under the heading "Genealogy" are:

• Donald Curkeet's Plymouth Devonshire and Surrounding Parishes for Family Genealogy website provides church and churhyard photographs, and information, in some cases including parish register name indexes, for a number of Plymouth area parishes. He provided a very useful sketchmap.
• Plymouth is one of the growing number of places for which the Devon Heritage website provides census or parish register transcriptions, articles, and/or illustrations, etc. (For Plymouth they supply lists on specific events or groups of people at varying dates.)

• The Plymouth Museums Art Galleries website describes the 'Of the Parish' headstone and memorial indexing and photography project with explanations of how to search for names in various indexes provided by a number of local groups. The remains in many of the early cemeteries within Plymouth were transferred to the cemetery in Egg Buckland or Eggbuckland after World War II. Other sections of this website might also be of interest to genealogists searching for ancestors in the Plymouth area.