Leicester St Martin, Leicestershire Genealogy

England   Leicestershire

Parish History
The Cathedral Church of St Martin is an Ancient Parish in the City of Leicester.

St. Martin's has for long been regarded as the principal church in the borough. In 1575 it was ordered that two or three members of every household in the borough and its suburbs should attend the Wednesday and Friday sermons in the church. It was also specifically associated with the corporation, and the mayor was made responsible for the churchwardens' accounts by an order in the common hall in 1510. Nichols referred to St.Martin's as the principal church in the county and by the 19th century the assize sermons, archdeacon's courts, and bishop's confirmations were held there. The undoubted pre-eminence of St. Martin's madeit the obvious choice for a cathedral, when it was proposed to create a see of Leicester in 1922, although the claims of St. Margaret's were also pressed. In 1922 the church was made collegiate,with the Bishop of Peterborough as dean supported by a college of clerical and lay canons, to prepare for the creation of the new bishopric. By an Order in Council the see was created in 1926 in fulfilment of the Bishopric of Leicester Measure of the previous year. St. Martin's Church was hallowed as the cathedral in February 1927. Dr. Cyril Bardsley,who had been the first dean of the temporary college,was appointed the first bishop. Great emphasis was laid at the time upon the existence of the Anglo Saxon see of Leicester from the 7th to the 9th centuries, which was thus recreated after a thousand years.

The cathedral body now consists of a provost and college of canons, clerical and lay. The provost is also the Vicar of St. Martin's in its capacity as a parish church.

The advowson of St. Martin's was presumably one of those given in 1107 to the college of St. Mary de Castro and transferred in 1143 to Leicester Abbey. The church is first mentioned in 1220,when it was already appropriated to the abbey.

From: 'The ancient borough: St. Martin's ', A History of the County of Leicester: volume 4: The City of Leicester (1958), pp. 361-369. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=66578 Date accessed: 22 May 2011.

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 Leicestershire 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
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Web sites
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