Place:Little Crosby, Lancashire, England

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia Little Crosby has been since 1974 a small village in Merseyside, England, the successor county to Lancashire for the area from Liverpool to Southport. Despite being only 8 miles of Liverpool it has retained its rural character by, for example, opting not to have street lights. As part of Lancashire the village was an urban district in its own right until annexed to the Great Crosby urban district in 1932. This urban district was combined with other districts to form the Municipal Borough of Crosby in 1937. This in turn was absorbed into the new Metropolitan Borough of Sefton, Merseyside in 1974. The village is perhaps the oldest extant Roman Catholic village in England, the squires being the notable recusant Blundell family. The village character has changed little from a 17th-century description that "it had not a beggar, ... an alehouse ... [or] a Protestant in it...". In 2009 Protestants do reside in the village as old values change – Protestant inhabitants however must be "vetted" by the local Squire before taking occupation of one of the 50 or so dwellings. In 1986 a senior member of the hamlet was quoted in the Liverpool Echo as saying "Protestants are discouraged from settling in our village". Notwithstanding any remaining sectarianism, the village is now home to the "Rock the Boat" Brewery, supplying a number of pubs and bottle shops in the wider Crosby area. They host occasional open days and Protestants are more than welcome. The village is dominated by the St Mary's Roman Catholic Church, inspired by Augustus Pugin. Opposite the church is St. Mary's Roman Catholic School, a single storey 1960s building. The first school for the village was established by the Squire, William Blundell, at Boundary Cottage in 1843, next to the brook that then ran between Great Crosby and Little Crosby. In 1859 the school moved to a new building next to the presbytery of the church, opposite the current site. The current school building replaced that in 1964. The school takes pupils from the village and neighbouring villages of Hightown and Ince Blundell.

Research Tips

• 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. 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, 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.
• Civil registration or vital statistics and census records will be found within registration districts. To ascertain the registration district to which a parish belongs, see Registration Districts in Lancashire, part of the UK_BMD website.
• Lancashire Online Parish Clerks provide free online information from the various parishes, along with other data of value to family and local historians conducting research in the County of Lancashire.
• FamilySearch Lancashire 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).
• Ancestry (international subscription necessary) has a number of county-wide collections of Church of England baptisms, marriages and burials, some from the 1500s, and some providing microfilm copies of the manuscript entries. There are specific collections for Liverpool (including Catholic baptisms and marriages) and for Manchester. Their databases now include electoral registers 1832-1935. Another pay site is FindMyPast.
• A map of Lancashire circa 1888 supplied by A Vision of Britain through Time includes the boundaries between the parishes and shows the hamlets within them.
• A map of Lancashire circa 1954 supplied by A Vision of Britain through Time is a similar map for a later timeframe.
• GENUKI provides a website covering many sources of genealogical information for Lancashire. The organization is gradually updating the website and the volunteer organizers may not have yet picked up all the changes that have come with improving technology.
• The Victoria County History for Lancashire, provided by British History Online, covers the whole of the county in six volumes (the seventh available volume [numbered Vol 2] covers religious institutions). The county is separated into its original hundreds and the volumes were first published between 1907 and 1914. Most parishes within each hundred are covered in detail. Maps within the text can contain historical information not available elsewhere.
• A description of the township of Little Crosby from British History Online (Victoria County Histories), published 1907