Place:Knutsford, Cheshire, England

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

source: Family History Library Catalog

the following text is based on an article in Wikipedia

Knutsford is a town in Cheshire, England, located 14 miles (23 km) southwest of Manchester and 9 miles (14 km) northwest of Macclesfield.

Knutsford has been under the unitary council of Cheshire East since April 2009. Prior to that Knutsford was in the Borough of Macclesfield (1974-2009) and before that Knutsford Urban District Council (1895-1974). The parish of Knutsford was formally created in 1895 from the parishes of Knutsford Over and Knutsford Nether. In 1936 it also absorbed most of the parish of Bexton, part of Tabley Superior and Toft.

It is situated on the Cheshire Plain, between the Peak District in the South Pennines to the east and the Clwydian Range in the Welsh mountains to the west. Knutsford is an affluent residential area in Cheshire's "Golden Triangle" and a dormitory town for people working in Manchester.

Knutsford's main town centre streets, Princess Street (also known locally as Top Street) and King Street lower down (also known as Bottom Street), form the "hub" of the town. At one end of the narrow King Street is an entrance to Tatton Park. The Tatton estate was home to the Egerton family, and has given its name to Tatton parliamentary constituency, which also includes the neighbouring communities of Alderley Edge and Wilmslow.

A Vision of Britain through Time provides the following description of Knutsford from John Bartholomew's Gazetteer of the British Isles of 1887:

"Knutsford, market town and par. with ry. sta., Cheshire, in N. of [county], near river Birken, 7 miles NW. of Northwich, 15 miles SW. of Manchester, and 172 NW. of London by rail--parish: 4,931 acres, population 4,859; town (comprising Nether Knutsford township and part of the township of Over Knutsford): population 4,290; P.O., T.O. [telegraph office], 2 Banks. Market-day, Saturday. Knutsford (supposed to have been originally Canutes Ford) is a town of great antiquity; it occupies a pleasant and healthy situation on high ground, and contains many fine residences of Manchester merchants. The town possesses a grammar school, established prior to the Reformation. The mfrs. of cotton, worsted, and leather goods are the chief industries. Knutsford par. contains the townships of Nether Knutsford, 793 acres, population 3,895, and Over Knutsford, 967 acres, population 410."

As Knutsford Over and Knutsford Nether, Knutsford was originally in Bucklow Hundred. The two parishes (then townships in the ancient parish of Knutsford) have been redirected here.

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.