Place:Yarmouth, Isle of Wight, England

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source: Family History Library Catalog

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

Yarmouth is a town, port and civil parish in the western part of the Isle of Wight, England, off the southern coast of Hampshire, England. The town is named for its location at the mouth of the small Western Yar river (there is also an Eastern Yar on the island). Yarmouth is a crossing point for the river, originally with a ferry, replaced with a road bridge in 1863. Although classified as a "town", it had a population of only 865 in the UK census of 2011. Yarmouth's area was expanded in 1933 when the neighbouring parish of Thorley was absorbed into it.

Yarmouth has been a settlement for over a thousand years, and is one of the very earliest on the Isle of Wight. The first record of a settlement here was in King Ethelred the Unready's record of the Danegeld tax of 991. It was originally called Eremue, meaning "muddy estuary". The Normans laid out the streets of Yarmouth on the grid system, a plan which can still be seen in the layout today. It grew rapidly, being given its first Charter as a town in 1135. The town became a parliamentary borough in the Middle Ages, and the Yarmouth constituency was represented by two members of Parliament until 1832.

Until the building of the castle, regular raids on the island by the French continued, and in 1544 the town of Yarmouth was reputed to have been burned down. Legend has it that the church bells were carried off to Cherbourg or Boulogne in France.

Yarmouth Castle was built in 1547. It survives, and is now in the care of English Heritage. It is effectively a gun platform built by Henry VIII to strengthen the Solent and protect the Isle of Wight, historically an important strategical foothold for any attempted invasion of England.

In St. James's Church there is a monument to the 17th-century admiral Sir Robert Holmes who based his operations at Yarmouth. He obtained it in a raid on a French ship, when he seized an unfinished statue of Louis XIV of France and forced the sculptor to finish it with his own head rather than the king's.

Yarmouth Pier was opened in 1876. Originally 685 ft (207.5m) long, it's now 609 ft (186m) but is still the longest timber pier in England open to the public, and is a docking point for tourist steamers as well as for ferries from the mainland.

Research Tips

• Victoria County History of Hampshire, volume 5, chapter on Yarmouth.
• Victoria County History of Hampshire has an outline map of the parishes of West Medina.
• The Isle of Wight Family History Society has a website with a lot of information.
• GENUKI has a list of archive holders in Hampshire including the Hampshire Record Office, various museums in Portsmouth and Southhampton, the Isle of Wight Record Office and Archives.
• The Hampshire Online Parish Clerk project has a large collection of transcriptions from Parish Registers across Hampshire.
• A listing of all the Registration Districts in England and Wales since their introduction in 1837 together with tables listing the parishes that were part of each district and the time period covered, along with detailed notes on changes of parish name, mergers, etc. Do respect the copyright on this material.
• The three-storey City Museum in Winchester covers the Iron Age and Roman periods, the Middle Ages, and the Victorian period.
• Volumes in The Victoria County History Series are available for Hampshire through British History Online. There are three volumes and the county is covered by parishes within the old divisions of "hundreds".

A collection of maps on the A Vision of Britain through Time website illustrating the English county of Hampshire over the period 1832-1932 (the last two are expandible):

• The Hundreds of Hampshire, a map from HMSO Boundary Commissioners, dated 1832
• Hampshire showing parishes in their Rural Districts as of 1900, a map from the Ordnance Survey
• Hampshire showing parishes in their Rural Districts after the alterations of 1932, a map from the Ordnance Survey

• A group of maps of the post-1974 municipal districts or boroughs of Hampshire on Wikipedia Commons