Place:Stoke Damerel, Devon, England

NameStoke Damerel
Alt namesStoke-Damerelsource: hyphenated
TypeAncient parish, Civil parish
Coordinates50.3748°N 4.1623°W
Located inDevon, England
See alsoRoborough Hundred, Devon, Englandhundred of which the parish was a part
Devonport, Devon, Englandmunicipal borough into which it was absorbed in 1823
Plymouth, Devon, Englandcounty borough then city which absorbed Devonport in 1914
NOTE: There are seven places spread out across the large county of Devon with the word "Stoke" in its name. There are five parishes: Stoke Canon, Stoke Damerel, Stoke Fleming, Stoke Gabriel and Stoke Rivers and a further two hamlets located within another parish: Stoke in Holne and Stoke in Hartland.

It is not helpful to name a place simply as "Stoke". Check the sources in which you found the person or family. Quote the source. If that source does not give details, look for another one.


Stoke Damerel was one of the ancient parishes of Devon. The village, locally named Stoke, was a little way inland, but the parish included stretches of the coast west of Plymouth and north of Devonport. The town of "Plymouth Dock" grew up in the parish around dockyards established at the start of the 18th century. Plymouth Dock was renamed Devonport in 1823. Devonport was constituted a Municipal Borough in 1837, with the Borough covering the whole of Stoke Damerel parish. Stoke Damerel parish was formally abolished in 1888, just before Devonport Municipal Borough was made a County Borough in 1889.

Devonport County Borough was in turn abolished in 1914, becoming part of Plymouth County Borough. Plymouth was made a city in 1928.

The former village of Stoke is now surrounded by suburban development.

the following text is based on an article in Wikipedia

Stoke, also referred to by its earlier name of Stoke Damerel, is a parish, that was once part of the historical Devonport; this was prior to 1914. In 1914, Devonport and Plymouth amalgamated along with East Stonehouse; the new town took the name of Plymouth. Since the amalgamation Stoke has been an inner suburb of Plymouth in the English county of Devon.

Stoke is now densely built up with family houses and bisected by the main railway line from Paddington Station in London to Penzance. The parish church is notable not only for its evolving architecture, but also its contents and historical connections. The area has been prosperous for several hundred years, and there are some distinguished private houses dating to Georgian and Victorian times.

Image:Plympton St. Mary RD 1931 1944.png

Registration Districts

and then, after mergers, covering the same geographical area,

Further information on Plymouth's registration district is missing from source notes (Brett Langston's List of Devon Registration Districts, see below)

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.
  • 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.)
This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at Stoke, Plymouth. 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.