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- the following text is based on an article in Wikipedia
Witheridge (#29 on map) is a civil parish with a village of the same name in the North Devon District of Devon, England. Before 1974 it was in the South Molton Rural District.
In the 2001 UK census the population of the parish was 1,162, reducing slightly to 1,158 at the 2011 UK Census. Its name is derived from the Old English for "Weather Ridge", probably as a result of its exposed location on the top of a hill, which means it and surrounding hamlets such as Nomansland (in neighbouring Cruwys Morchard parish in the Mid Devon District) generally suffer from poor weather for much of the year. Witheridge is almost equidistant from Dartmoor and Exmoor.
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).
- "WITHERIDGE, a village, a parish, a [registration] sub-district, and a hundred, in Devon. The village stands 7 miles ENE of Lapford [railway] station, and 8 E of Chulmleigh; was once a borough and a market-town; and has a post-office under Morchard-Bishop, North Devon, and three annual fairs.
- "The parish comprises 9,048 acres. Real property: £6,657. Population: 1,237. Houses: 260. The manor and much of the land belong to the Earl of Portsmouth; and the rest of the property is subdivided. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Exeter. Value: £350. Patron: the Rev. W. P. Thomas. The church is early perpendicular. There are chapels for Independents and Bible Christians, an endowed school with £21 a year, a British school, and charities £13. The antiquary Chapple was a native."
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Registration Districts
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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.)
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