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- the following text is based on an article in Wikipedia
Shirwell (#29 on map) is a village, civil parish and former manor in the North Devon District in the county of Devon, England. It was also formerly the name of a hundred of Devon. The village lies about 3.5 miles northeast of the town of Barnstaple, to the east of the A39 road to Lynton. The parish is surrounded clockwise from the north by the parishes of East Down (#13), Arlington (#1), Loxhore (#23), Bratton Fleming (#7), Goodleigh (#16), Barnstaple, West Pilton (#36) and Marwood (#25). In the UK census of 2001 its population was 333, little changed from the 1901 figure of 338.
Between 1894 and 1974 Shirwell was in the Barnstaple Rural District and since 1974 in the North Devon District.
The parish church in the village is dedicated to St Peter. The building has 13th-century origins and the chancel is of 14th-century date. It underwent a Victorian restoration by the architect William White between 1873 and 1889. An effigy in the chancel is said to be of Blanche St. Leger (d.1483) and above this is a monument to Lady Anne Chichester (d. 1723). Other 18th-century monuments survive in the church.
The Manor of Shirwell was the seat of two of the leading families of North Devon, the Beaumonts (to the end of the 15th century) and their heirs the Chichesters of Raleigh, Pilton, both of which families lived on the estate of Youlston within the Manor of Shirwell. The manor house which survives today known as Youlston Park exists largely in its Georgian form, but it retains many impressive late 17th-century interiors; it is described in Pevsner as "one of the most rewarding in North Devon".
(See also the Wikipedia article, the Manor of Shirwell.)
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Registration Districts
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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.
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- 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.
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- 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.)
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