Lancashire Ancient ParishesEdit This Page

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England Lancashire Lancashire Parishes

Below is the list of the approximately 76 ancient parishes (with links) that comprise Lancashire. Each parish link contains a treasure of information-including information about the creation of and parish/chapel history, about census records, civil registration of births, marriages and deaths, and numerous church record links to on-line data from baptism, marriage and burial (and etc.) registers.

The county's 76 parishes, unlike most other England counties, possessed just over 400 chapelries. These smaller chapels (chapelries) subdivided each parish to which they were attached with Manchester possessing by far the greatest number of chapels within its boundary (with approximately 150, by 1885!), and making it England's largest parish.

Click the link (below) to find out which chapelries were attached to each ancient parish and then be certain to search for your ancestor in not only the parish registers but inall of those chapelries (their registers as well) which are attached to each ancient parish.

You can click a "Comprehensive List of Chapelries" link in each Parish page to view and printout a list of chapelries attached to the parish.

Key Strategies:

1. Where available, always search indexes first.
2. For the sake of thoroughness in research, always search registers of the ancient parish then accurately identify and search the registers of each of its attached chapelries within its boundary.

These are "must-do" steps, in order to locate and prove Lancashire ancestral connections in especially the pre-Civil Registration period (pre-1837).