Place:St. Giles in the Wood, Devon, England

the following text is based on an article in Wikipedia St. Giles in the Wood (#19 on map) is a civil parish with a village of the same name in the Torridge District of Devon, England. It was never a manor of itself and the parish church only came into being in 1309 when licence was obtained from the Bishop of Exeter to build a chapel of ease; the church at Great Torrington being then considered too far for the convenience of the local inhabitants. The licence was obtained by Sir Richard Merton, who then held the advowson of Great Torrington. Benefactors to the new church, dedicated to St. Giles the Hermit, included Sir William Herward of Dodscott, and a member of the Pollard family of Way, Barry of Winscott, de Stevenstone of Stevenstone, and Dynant of Whitesley. The parish church of St Giles was, until the rebuilding of 1863 by Hon. Mark Rolle of Stevenstone, of the Perpendicular-Gothic style, of which only the tower survives. Many monuments survived and were moved into the new church and include the monument and effigy of Thomas Chafe (d. 1648) of Dodscott, three monumental brasses, of Alenora Pollard (d. 1430), Margaret Rolle of Stevenstone (d. 1592) and a small brass of her husband John Rolle (d.1570). There exist also 19th- and 20th-century monuments to the Rolle family. At Winscott was the estate of the Risdons where was born Tristram Risdon (c. 1580 – 1640), author of the Survey of Devonshire. From 1894 until 1974 St. Giles in the Wood was in the Torrington Rural District and since 1974 local administration is dealt with by the Torridge District. For more information, see the EN Wikipedia article St Giles in the Wood. Includes further descriptions of the manors mentioned above.

Registration Districts

• Torrington Registration District (1837-1936)
• Bideford Registration District (1936-1998)
• Torridge Registration District (1998-2007)
• Devon Registration District (2007- )

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.)