User:Iluvhistory66/Sandbox/England Jurisdictions Revamp


 * Parish
 * County
 * Civil Registration District
 * Diocese
 * Rural Deanery
 * Poor Law Union
 * Hundred
 * Province
 * Division

Jurisdictions 1851: Parish County Civil Registration District Diocese Rural Deanery Poor Law Union Hundred Province Division

Check and understand the Chapman Code

Example: Derbyshire

Parish - Glossop County - Derbyshire Civil Registration District - Hayfield Diocese - Court of the Bishop of Lichfield (Episcopal Consistory) Rural Deanery - Lichfield Poor Law Union - Glossop Hundred - High Peake Province - Canterbury Division -

Jurisdictions Explained
NEW PAGE: A jurisdiction is an area governed by a system of laws. Each jurisdiction has a geographic boundary with some type of authority (i.e., manor, parish, town, county). This authority has the power to apply and enforce the laws. In England birth, marriage, death, census, and other genealogical records are organized and stored in different governmental levels such as parish, town, and county.

Ancient Parish
Parish, the smallest unit of ecclesiastical and administrative organization in England. During the 7th and 8th centuries, groups of priests organized large church areas to better serve their parishioners. Throughout the 10th and 12th centuries these large areas were divided into smaller areas by landowners who built more local churches to serve the needs of their families, tenants, and servants. These smaller territories developed into the formal parish system.

Ecclesiastical Parish
Ecclesiastical parishes originated in the Medieval period when tithes were paid by the parish inhabitants to support the Church. These units were distinguished from the Civil Parishes after 1597 with the passing of the first Poor Relief Act. This Act also led to many subordinate areas, such as chapelries, being raised to parochial rank and the creation of many new parishes.
 * Chapelry:

A subsidiary place of worship to the main parish church. A chapelry also had a role in civil government, being a subdivision of a parish, which was used as a basis for the Poor Law until the establishment of England and Wales Poor Law Records 1834-1948 in the 19th century.

Civil Parish
A civil parish is the most local unit of government in England. A parish is governed by a parish council or parish meeting, which exercises a limited number of functions that would otherwise be delivered by the local authority. There are no civil parishes in Greater London and not all of the rest of England is parished.

County
The county was the basic unit of regional mapping from the mid-16th to the mid-19th centuries. FamilySearch uses England county historic boundaries pre-1974. The records dating before 1974 are located within the information found in the historic counties. This practice better assists our patrons who are researching their ancestors before the modern time period.

Civil Registration District
A registration district in the United Kingdom is a type of administrative region which exists for the purpose of civil registration of births, marriages, and deaths and civil partnerships. It has also been used as the basis for the collation of census information. Before 1837 only churches recorded birth, marriage, and death information in England. In the early 1800s, Parliament recognized the need to keep accurate records for voting, planning, taxation, and defense purposes. Legislation was passed to create a civil registration of births, marriages, and deaths for England and Wales and. England and Wales registration began on 1 July 1837, for births, marriages, divorces and deaths. However, this new law did not have universal coverage until tougher laws were passed in 1874.

For more information see England Civil Registration.

Diocese
The diocese was the basic geographical division of the church from the earliest times. There was a continual rearrangement of dioceses before the Normans, but the system established by them in the eleventh century remained until the nineteenth century, altered only slightly in the sixteenth century.

Dioceses of the Church of England Dioceses are directed by a bishop with ordinary jurisdiction, and the town in which his cathedral is located is properly called a city. On occasion, the term 'city' has been granted to other towns by royal letters patent (Cambridge and Southampton in the 20th century, for example).

The 44 dioceses are divided into two Provinces, the Province of Canterbury (with 30) and the Province of York (with 14). The archbishops of Canterbury and York have pastoral oversight over the bishops within their province, along with certain other rights and responsibilities.

Interactive Map
FamilySearch has an interactive map of the 1851 jurisdictions of England. This map allows the user to choose a jurisdiction (such as a county, parish, or diocese) then choose different nearby jurisdictions (like hundred, rural deanery, or province) to see where vital records were housed. A table pops up showing what years parish registers exist, the names of other associated jurisdictions, and other similar search tools.

OLD TEXT: When doing genealogical research, records will be organised by and make reference to various types of administrative units. Some knowledge of these can be useful to understand the records.

Interactive Map
FamilySearch has a very useful map of English jurisdictions as they stood in 1851. This map is interactive, allowing the user to display of map of a selected type of jurisdiction, and to click on an area and see which of the other jurisdictions it belongs to, and the years that Anglican Church Records start.

Historic counties (pre-1974)
England was divided into 40 counties, the highest traditional unit of subdivision in England. These boundaries remained roughly unchanged until reforms in 1974. Their use is preferred in genealogy to the Ceremonial Counties of post-1974.

Abbreviations (Champman codes)
For a list of England pre-1974 counties and their standard abbreviations see the articles County Abbreviations and Chapman Code, created by Dr. Colin Chapman, or go to GENUKI.

Ceremonial counties
From 1974 onwards, ceremonial counties have become an important unit of subdivision in England. England now has a two-tier system of counties and districts(sometimes boroughs or Royal Boroughs). These ceremonial counties correspond roughly to the old counties, with the exceptions that Manchester, Birmingham and London now have their own counties. These ceremonial counties do not necessarily have any administrative purposes today, for in many the County Council has been abolished and all local governance is now on managed on the district level.

Parishes
The basic unit until the late nineteenth century in England was the parish. Church Records and Censuses were generally arranged by parish, and Registration Districts for Civil Registration and Poor Law Unions for poor relief were generally created by merging several parishes together. Parishes have now been abolished in many areas, but there is a growing trend of re-establishing parishes as the very lowest level of local government.

Registration Districts
Civil Registration is based on the Registration District. These usually covered multiple parishes merged together. When searching indexes of civil registration you will need to know what registration district the birth, marriage or death you are looking for occurred in.

Their boundaries changed frequently over the years. Fortunately the website GENUKI has a database of England Registration Districts that covers at least up to 1974.

Hundreds
See England Hundreds

The Hundred is a very old subdivision of a County used in some records, notably the 1841 Census.