Place:Market Drayton, Shropshire, England

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

source: Family History Library Catalog

the following text is based chiefly on an article in Wikipedia

Market Drayton was originally an "ancient borough" located in the northeast of Shropshire with part of the area of its administration in Staffordshire. It is on the River Tern and the Shropshire Union Canal. It is a "market town" with the charter for a weekly Wednesday market granted by Henry III in 1245.

The borough was also known as simply as Drayton and then as Drayton in Hales, Hales being the name of a wider area of Shropshire.

Two other historical facts come from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1870-72 (Source: A Vision of Britain through Time):

"....The church was built in the time of King Stephen, but has a steeple of much more recent date; and was renovated in 1787. A fierce battle was fought, in 1459, on Bloore-heath, about a mile from the town, between the Yorkists and the Lancastrians."

A Vision of Britain through Time also quotes from Bartholomew's Gazetteer of the British Isles in 1877:

"The free grammar-school was founded in the reign of Philip and Mary [i.e. Queen Mary Tudor who reigned 1553-1558 and her consort, Philip of Spain]. Market Drayton has mfrs. of paper and haircloth, and some foundries and tanneries."

History of Governance

By the middle of the 19th century Drayton in Hales had become the parish and Market Drayton, known as Drayton Magna, was one of its seven townships (two of which were in Staffordshire). In 1914 there was a reorganization of the area, with Market Drayton becoming a civil parish which included another of the townships, Drayton Parva or Little Drayton, located to the west of the centre of the town.

See Drayton in Hales for a full explanation of the 1914 division.

The parish of Drayton was located in the North Bradford Hundred of Shropshire. From its foundation as a civil parish in 1914 until 1967, Market Drayton was an urban district, but in another reorganization in 1967 the parish lost this designation and became part of Market Drayton Rural District along with other surrounding civil parishes. (The rural district had been named simply Drayton Rural District until Market Drayton became part ot it.)

In 1974 rural districts throughout England were abolished and replaced with new non-metropolitan districts which combined the rural districts, urban districts, municipal boroughs and county boroughs that existed within their newly drawn geographical borders. The North Shropshire District, so created, existed until 2009 when it was replaced by a unitary authority called the Shropshire District which covered the whole of the county with the exception of The Wrekin District (to the south of Market Drayton) which was formed in 1998.

Research Tips

• The historical short form for Shropshire was "Salop". This is quite often found in archive material.
• Shropshire Archives, Castle Gates, Shrewsbury SY1 2AQ
• Shropshire Family History Society.
• The GENUKI main page for Shropshire provides information on various topics covering the whole of the county, and there is also a link to a list of parishes. Under each parish there is a list of the settlements within it and brief description of each. This is a list of pre-1834 ancient or ecclesiastical parishes but there are suggestions as to how to find parishes set up since then.
• GENUKI also provides transcriptions of parish registers for numerous parishes throughout Shropshire. These will be noted at the bottom of this list as time permits for the parishes involved. Each register is preceded by historical notes from the editor-transciber and other details than simply births, marriages and deaths that have been found in the individual books from the parishes. These registers probably only go up to 1812 when the proscribed style for registers across the country was altered.
• GENUKI lists under each parish further references to other organizations who hold genealogical information for the local area. (URLs for these other websites may not be up to date.)
• The FamilyTree Wiki has a series of pages similar to those provided by GENUKI which may have been prepared at a later date and from more recent data. The wiki has a link to English Jurisdictions 1851. There is a list of all the parishes in existence in 1851 with maps indicating their boundaries. The website is very useful for finding the ecclesiastical individual parishes within large cities and towns.
• A Vision of Britain through Time, Shropshire, section "Units and Statistics" leads to analyses of population and organization of the county from about 1800 through 1974. There are similar pages available for all civil parishes, municipal boroughs and other administrative divisions that existed pre-1974. Descriptions provided are usually based on a gazetteer of 1870-72 which often provides brief notes on the economic basis of the settlement and significant occurences through its history.
• The two maps below indicate the boundaries between parishes, etc., but for a more detailed view of a specific area try a map from this selection. The oldest series are very clear at the third magnification offered. Comparing the map details with the GENUKI details for the same area is well worthwhile.

• Map of Shropshire illustrating urban and rural districts in 1900 produced by UK Ordnance Survey and provided online by A Vision of Britain through Time. Parish boundaries and settlements within parishes are shown. (Unfortunately the online copy of this map has pencil codings in each parish which make it difficult to see the orignal.)
• Map of Shropshire urban and rural districts in 1944 produced by UK Ordnance Survey and provided online by A Vision of Britain through Time. Parish boundaries and settlements within parishes are shown. This is not a repeat of the first map. There were a number of changes to urban and rural district structure in the 1930s.

• A map of the ancient divisions named "hundreds" is to be found in A Vision of Britain through Time. Some of the hundreds were broken into separate sections with other hundreds in between.
• The website British History Online provides four volumes of the Victoria County History Series on Shropshire. Volume 2 covers the religious houses of the county; Volume 4 provides a history of agriculture across the county, and Volumes 10 and 11 deal with Munslow Hundred, the Borough of Wenlock and the Telford area (i.e., the northeastern part of the county). The rest of the county is not presently covered. References to individual parishes will be furnished as time permits.
• A transcription of the Market Drayton Independent Chapel parish registers is online and is provided through the auspices of GENUKI.