Place:West Lancashire Rural, Lancashire, England

:the following text is based on an article in Wikipedia West Lancashire was a rural district in Lancashire, England from 1894 to 1974. It was created with other rural districts in 1894, and was a successor to the Ormskirk Rural Sanitary District. As the map illustrates, it covered an area a short distance inland from the Irish Sea. In 1894 most of the places on the coast were already sufficiently populated to be municipal and county boroughs. Formby and Ainsdale soon followed. Ainsdale became part of Southport and Formby became an urban district. West Lancashire Rural District was expanded in 1932 by the abolition of the Sefton Rural District which was made up of smaller civil parishes situated closer to Liverpool. (Liverpool, itself, is just off the map in the southwest corner.) The district was abolished in 1974 under the Local Government Act 1972 with its parishes being divided between the new non-metropolitan Borough of West Lancashire and parts of the new metropolitan county of Merseyside, England. Destinations for each parish are given below. The border of the two rural districts as of 1894 has been drawn in green. Parishes in the rural districts have been named on the map where there was room to place them. This map was based on H.M.S.O. Boundary Commission Report 1917: Lancashire provided online by A Vision of Britain Through Time (University of Portsmouth Department of Geography).

Research Tips

• See the Wikipedia articles on parishes and civil parishes for descriptions of this lowest rung of local administration. The original parishes (known as ancient parishes) were ecclesiastical, under the jurisdiction of the local priest. A parish covered a specific geographical area and was sometimes equivalent to that of a manor. Sometimes, in the case of very large rural parishes, there were chapelries where a "chapel of ease" allowed parishioners to worship closer to their homes. In the 19th century the term civil parish was adopted to define parishes with a secular form of local government. In WeRelate both civil and ecclesiastical parishes are included in the type of place called a "parish". Smaller places within parishes, such as chapelries and hamlets, have been redirected into the parish in which they are located. The names of these smaller places are italicized within the text.
• Rural districts were groups of geographically close civil parishes in existence between 1894 and 1974. They were formed as a middle layer of administration between the county and the civil parish. Inspecting the archives of a rural district will not be of much help to the genealogist or family historian, unless there is need to study land records in depth.
• Civil registration or vital statistics and census records will be found within registration districts. To ascertain the registration district to which a parish belongs, see Registration Districts in Lancashire, part of the UK_BMD website.
• Lancashire Online Parish Clerks provide free online information from the various parishes, along with other data of value to family and local historians conducting research in the County of Lancashire.
• FamilySearch Lancashire Research Wiki provides a good overview of the county and also articles on most of the individual parishes (very small or short-lived ones may have been missed).
• Ancestry (international subscription necessary) has a number of county-wide collections of Church of England baptisms, marriages and burials, some from the 1500s, and some providing microfilm copies of the manuscript entries. There are specific collections for Liverpool (including Catholic baptisms and marriages) and for Manchester. Their databases now include electoral registers 1832-1935. Another pay site is FindMyPast.
• A map of Lancashire circa 1888 supplied by A Vision of Britain through Time includes the boundaries between the parishes and shows the hamlets within them.
• A map of Lancashire circa 1954 supplied by A Vision of Britain through Time is a similar map for a later timeframe.
• GENUKI provides a website covering many sources of genealogical information for Lancashire. The organization is gradually updating the website and the volunteer organizers may not have yet picked up all the changes that have come with improving technology.
• The Victoria County History for Lancashire, provided by British History Online, covers the whole of the county in six volumes (the seventh available volume [numbered Vol 2] covers religious institutions). The county is separated into its original hundreds and the volumes were first published between 1907 and 1914. Most parishes within each hundred are covered in detail. Maps within the text can contain historical information not available elsewhere.