Place:Latimer, Buckinghamshire, England

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

source: Family History Library Catalog

the following text is based on an article in Wikipedia

Latimer is a village and civil parish that sits on the border between Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire, in England. In 2013 the civil parish was renamed Latimer & Ley Hill. The parish now forms part of the Buckinghamshire district of Chiltern. Latimer & Ley Hill parish includes the villages of Latimer, Ley Hill and Tyler's Hill.

Latimer was originally joined with the adjacent village of Chenies. Both were anciently called "Isenhampstead", at a time when there was a royal palace in the vicinity. However in the reign of King Edward III of England the lands were split between two manorial barons: Thomas Cheyne in the village that later became called "Chenies", and William Latimer in Latimer in 1326.

At the time of the English Civil War Latimer belonged to the Earl of Devonshire. When Charles I was captured by the Parliamentarian forces he was brought to Latimer on his way to London.

The small village includes 17th and 18th century cottages around a triangular village green with a pump on it. The church of St Mary Magdelane was rebuilt by Sir George Gilbert Scott in 1867. The rectory was built in the 18th century in grey and red brick.

Throughout the 19th century (and possibly before) Latimer was a hamlet and chapelry in the parish of Chesham. It became a separate civil parish in 1899. In 1907 its boundaries with the Hertfordshire parishes of Bovingdon and Flaunden were altered, but in 1934 it lost 792 acres to Chesham. (Source:A Vision of Britain through Time)

Ley Hill is part of Latimer & Ley Hill parish and includes a common, two public houses and a Methodist Chapel. Tyler's Hill is also in Latimer & Ley Hill parish and includes St George's Anglican Church. The graveyard at Tyler's Hill which serves Ley Hill and Tyler's Hill is run by Latimer parish council.

The nearest railway station to Latimer is Chalfont and Latimer situated in the nearby town of Little Chalfont which is on the Chiltern Line between Aylesbury and Marylebone Station in London with London Underground services between Baker Street and Amersham.

Latimer House, a mansion on the hill on the edge of the village, was once a home of members of the Cavendish family who became the barons Chesham. The 3rd Baron Chesham was a commander in the Boer War. The original Elizabethan house, where Charles I was imprisoned in 1647 and Charles II took refuge before fleeing abroad, was gutted by fire in the early 1830s. The present red brick Tudor style mansion, which was designed by Edward Blore, was completed in 1838. The house was the home of the British military's National Defence College after World War II.

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. Buckinghamshire now only has a central registration office at County Hall in Aylesbury, but there are facilities for registering births, marriages and deaths in specific libraries around the county.

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.