Place:Woodbury, Devon, England

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia Woodbury (#38 on map) is a village and civil parish in the East Devon District in the English county of Devon, southeast of the city of Exeter. It is a commuter village and is primarily residential, since the majority of the workforce commute to Exeter. The parish, which has a population of 3,466 in the 2011 UK census lies on the east bank of the Exe Estuary and has borders – clockwise from the estuary – with the Topsham area of the Exeter District and the parishes of Clyst St. George, Clyst St. Mary, Farringdon, Colaton Raleigh, Bicton and Lympstone. Woodbury is part of the electoral ward of Woodbury and Lympstone whose population at the 2011 Census was 5,260. The village itself lies about four miles north of the centre of Exmouth on the B3179 road between Clyst St. George and Budleigh Salterton. About two miles to the north lies the east-west A3052 road and about 1.5 miles to the west of the village the A376 road that follows the Exe Estuary from Exeter down to Exmouth passes through the parish. The small settlements of Ebford and Exton are on this road.

A Vision of Britain through Time provides the following description of Woodbury from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1871-72:

"WOODBURY, a village, a parish, and a [registration] sub-district, in St. Thomas [registration] district, Devon. The village stands 2 miles ENE of Woodbury-Road [railway] station, and 3 ESE of Topsham; was once a market-town; is now a seat of petty-sessions; and has a post-office under Exeter, an inn, and a fair on 3 May.

"The parish includes six hamlets, and most of Woodbury-Salterton chapelry; and extends to the river Exe. Acres: 7,804; of which 500 are water. Real property: £9,869. Population: 1,966. Houses: 411. The manor belongs to the Hon. Mark Rolle. There are many fine residences. Nutwell Court was a castle till about the time of Edward IV., and was then converted into a handsome mansion by Lord Dinham. An ancient camp, successively British, Roman, Saxon, and Danish, is on [Woodbury] Common; and a considerable camp, with a park of artillery, was there , to resist the threatened French invasion, in 1798 and 1803. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Exeter. Value: £177. Patrons: the Vicars Choral of [Exeter]. The church is ancient. The curacy of Woodbury-Salterton is a separate benefice. There are a free church, a Unitarian chapel, an endowed school, a national school, and charities £51."

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.)