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- the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia
Slapton (#16 on map) is a village and civil parish in the District of South Hams in the English county of Devon. It is located near the A379 road between Kingsbridge and Dartmouth. In 1901 the population of the civil parish was 527, decreasing to 473 in 2001, and decreasing further to 434 at the 2011 UK census. The parish is surrounded clockwise from the north by the parishes of Blackawton (#3), Strete (#22), Stokenham (#21) and East Allington (#8).
Slapton was recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 as "Sladone". The Collegiate Chantry of St Mary was founded in 1372 or 1373 by Sir Guy de Brian. The Tower Inn and West tower remain and the tower has been designated by English Heritage as a grade I listed building. The Church of St. James dates from the late 13th or early 14th century, and is also grade I listed.
The nearby beach which is technically a coastal bar (see Wikipedia), known as "Slapton Sands", was in 1944 part of the site of the ill-fated Exercise Tiger. A Sherman tank that was sunk in this action has been recovered and now stands on the road behind the beach at nearby Torcross in Slapton parish. Part of Exercise Fabius took place a week after Exercise Tiger on Slapton Sands. The beach itself is not sand, but consists of small smooth pebbles ranging in size from 1/4 inch to several inches.
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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.)
- South Hams, Devon, A Genealogical Information Resource A collection of transcriptions of church registers and the 1841 census, plus a free lookup service in registers and other materials that have not been transcribed, for the South Hams District of Devon, England. The website states that its latest transcription was added 10 Nov 2018.
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