Great Crosby, Lancashire Genealogy

England Lancashire  Lancashire Parishes

Chapelry History
Great Crosby is an Ecclesiastical Parish in the county of Lancashire, created in 1729 from chapelry in   Sefton,_Lancashire Ancient Parish.

Historically a part of Lancashire, Great Crosby was a small village of Viking origin until the arrival of the railway in the 1840s. The village grew rapidly during the late 19th and early 20th century and merged with a number of distinct areas with their own character, to form the Great Crosby urban district.The Great Crosby urban district annexed Little Crosby in 1932. In 1937, the district was combined with the Waterloo with Seaforth urban district to form the municipal borough of Crosby which was in turn was absorbed into the new Metropolitan Borough of Sefton on 1 April 1974. These boundary changes defined the town of Crosby in its modern borders and shrank down the modern area of Great Crosby from the old urban district, making it an area of the modern town of Crosby which today is a separate area of Crosby to Blundellsands, Brighton-le-Sands, and Thornton.

St Luke's church was built in 1853 by the architect A.E.Holme and consecrated By the Bishop of Chester on 26 December 1853. It replaced the earlier chapel of St Michael Great Crosby

Prior to the creation of the Diocese of Liverpool the parish was within the Chester Diocese.

The modern parish of St Luke is in the Sefton Deanery of the Diocese of Liverpool.

CROSBY, GREAT, a chapelry, in the parish of Sefton, union and hundred of West Derby, S. division of the county of Lancaster, 6 miles (N. by W.) from Liverpool; containing, in the year 1846, 2194 inhabitants. Among the families early connected with Great Crosby, were those of De Aynosdale, Molyneux, Ferrers, and De Walton, of whom Robert De Walton took the name of Blundell, and was ancestor of the Blundells of Little Crosby, and the Blundells of Ince-Blundell. William Blundell, Esq., is now lord of the manor and principal proprietor. The chapelry comprises 2066 acres, whereof 561 are common land or waste. The population has very considerably increased within the last thirty years. The living is a perpetual curacy, in the patronage of the Rector of Sefton; income, £200. The chapel, dedicated to St. Luke, is a brick building with a tower, re-erected in 1774, and enlarged in 1847, at a cost of £250. The tithes have been commuted for £280. A Roman Catholic chapel dedicated to St. Peter was built in 1826: the Rev. William Brown was the first appointed priest, and still officiates. The grammar school here was founded in 1620, by John Harrison, merchant of London, a native of the township, and has an endowment of £50 a year, and a house and garden; the mastership is in the gift of the Merchant Taylors' Company, London, and the present head master is the Rev. Joseph Clark, appointed in 1829: the school is a good building of freestone. A school for girls, founded under the will of Catherine Halsall, is endowed with lands of the value annually of £40. Here is a spring, called St. Michael's.

From: A Topographical Dictionary of England by Samuel Lewis (1848), pp. 733-737. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=50907 Date accessed: 29 June 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.

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 * England Jurisdictions 1851
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Web sites
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