Place:West Alvington, Devon, England

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

West Alvington (#24 on map) is a small village and civil parish, located on the outskirts of Kingsbridge on the A381 road in southern Devon, England. The present ward, called Westville and Alvington, had a population of 2,042 at the 2011 census. the village is about a 10-minute walk from the centre of Kingsbridge.

It was originally part of the manor of Bowringsleigh, which took its name from the Bowring family, who were lords of the manor from about 1330 to the early sixteenth century. At one time, Alvington was part of the Royal Estates. The town of Kingsbridge was formed around a bridge which was built in or before the 10th century between the royal estates of Alvington, to the west, and Chillington, to the east, hence giving it the name of Kyngysbrygge ("King's bridge").

The following description from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1870-72 is provided by the website A Vision of Britain Through Time (University of Portsmouth Department of Geography). "ALLINGTON, or Alvington (West), a parish and a [registration] subdistrict in the district of [registration] Kingsbridge, Devon. The parish lies on the Marlborough [Malborough] creek, 1 mile SW of Kingsbridge, and 9½ S of Kingsbridge-Road [railway] station. It has a post office, of the name of West Alvington, under Kingsbridge; and it contains the hamlets of Woolstone, Easton, Sorley, and Bawcombe, and part of the hamlet of Marlborough [Malborough]. Acres: 4,110; of which 270 are water. Real property, with Thurlestone and South Milton: £13,111. Population: 925. Houses: 199. The property is much sub-divided. Allington manor belonged anciently to the Bastards. Garston gardens were famous for producing, on wall-trees, oranges and lemons of as fine a quality as any in Portugal. The right to a weekly market was granted to West Allington in 1270, but went into disuse. "The living is a vicarage, united with the curacies of Malborough, South Huish, and South Milton, in the diocese of Exeter. Value: £888. Patrons: the Dean and Chapter of Salisbury. The church has a screen, contains tombs of the Bastards, and is very good. The vicarage of Salcombe is a separate benefice. Charities, £9.

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.

• the Devon Heritage Centre at Exeter
• the Northern Record Office at Barnstaple
• the Plymouth and West Devon Record Office at Plymouth which is independent of the other two.

• 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.

• The FamilySearch Wiki provides a similar information service to GENUKI. An index of parishes leads to notes and references for each parish.

• Brett Langston's list of Devon Registration Districts and parishes within each registration district from 1837 to the present can indicate where to find details of civil registration entries since the process began in England.

• 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.)