Whitechapel, Lancashire Genealogy

England Lancashire  Lancashire Parishes

Chapelry History
Whitechapel St John is an Ecclesiastical Parish in the county of Lancashire, created in 1717 from Kirkham,_LancashireAncient Parish.

Whitechapel is a tiny hamlet in the civil parish of Goosnargh in Lancashire, England. It lies on the border of the Forest of Bowland near the foot of Beacon Fell, and close to the neighbouring village of Inglewhite. Its name is marked as White Chapel on some maps.

The area was known as "Threlfall" in the Domesday Book. A tiny 27×13-foot private chapel was built for the Threlfall family in Elizabethan times, and was rebuilt as St James' Church about 1738. The churchyard contains a sundial dated 1745 which is a Grade II listed building.

The name "Whitechapel" came into use in the early nineteenth century, named after the church. It was originally a part of Goosnargh ecclesiastical parish, but acquired independent parish status in 1846.

The Diocese of Blackburn is a Church of England diocese, covering much of Lancashire, created in 1926 from part of the Diocese of Manchester. The Diocese includes the towns of Blackburn, Blackpool, Burnley, and the cities of Lancaster, and Preston, as well as a large part of the Ribble Valley.

WHITECHAPEL, an ecclesiastical parish, in the parish of Kirkham, union of Preston, hundred of Amounderness, N. division of Lancashire, 5½ miles (S. E. by E.) from Garstang; containing about 800 inhabitants. It consists of the Higher end of the township of Goosnargh, and was constituted a parish in 1846. The surface is hilly, the soil inferior, and the scenery wild: there are extensive views of the Fylde, &amp;c. Richard Snell, Esq., of Leyland, is proprietor of White Hill here. It is not known when the church, formerly a chapel, was erected, but it was enlarged in the year 1716-17: it is dedicated to St. John. The living is a perpetual curacy, in the patronage of the Dean and Chapter of ChristChurch, Oxford; net income, £80. A school is endowed with £40 per annum, and a house for the master, built in 1840 by Thomas Oliverson, Esq.

From: A Topographical Dictionary of England by Samuel Lewis (1848), pp. 543-551. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=51398 Date accessed: 03 August 2010.

Civil Registration
Birth, marriages and deaths were kept by the government, from July 1837 to the present day. The civil registration article tells more about these records. There are several Internet sites with name lists or indexes. A popular site is FreeBMD.

Church records
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Census records
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Probate records
Records of wills, administrations, inventories, indexes, etc. were filed by the court with jurisdiction over this parish. Go to Lancashire Probate Records to find the name of the court having primary jurisdiction. Scroll down in the article to the section Court Jurisdictions by Parish.

Maps and Gazetteers
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 * England Jurisdictions 1851
 * Vision of Britain

Web sites
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