Place:Wembury, Devon, England

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NameWembury
Alt namesDown Thomassource: village in parish
Heybrook Baysource: village in parish
Andurnsource: hamlet in parish
Bovisandsource: hamlet in parish
Hollacombe (Wembury)source: hamlet in parish
Knightonsource: hamlet in parish
Langdonsource: hamlet in parish
Thornsource: hamlet in parish
Mew Stone and Cod Rock Islandssource: uninhabited islands off the coast
TypeAncient parish, Civil parish
Coordinates50.317°N 4.083°W
Located inDevon, England
See alsoPlympton Hundred, Devon, Englandhundred of which the parish was a part
Plympton St. Mary Rural, Devon, Englandrural district in which the parish was located 1894-1974
South Hams District, Devon, Englanddistrict municipality covering the area since 1974
the following text is based on an article in Wikipedia

Wembury (#22 on map) is a village and civil parish on the south coast of Devon, very close to Plymouth Sound. Wembury is also the name of the peninsula in which the village is situated. The village lies in the administrative district of the South Hams and was previously part of the Plympton St. Mary Rural District. The population, at the 2011 census, of the electoral ward containing Wembury and the neighbouring former parish of Brixton was 4,455.

The parish of Wembury was once divided into four manors: Wembury, Down Thomas, Langdon and Alfelmeston. According to Lyson's Devonshire, published in 1822, the manor of Wembury originally belonged to Plympton Priory. After the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539 it went into private ownership.

Today the parish of Wembury is divided into three principal villages; Wembury, Down Thomas, and Heybrook Bay. There are also a number of smaller hamlets; Hollacombe, Knighton, Thorn, Langdon, Andurn and Bovisand. The population of the parish was counted at 2,740 in the 2011 UK census.

For more information, see the EN Wikipedia article Wembury.

Image:Plympton St. Mary RD 1931 1944.png

Registration Districts

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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at Wembury. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with WeRelate, the content of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.