Chorley St Laurence, Lancashire Genealogy

England Lancashire  Lancashire Parishes



Parish History
Here are the chapelries standing within the civil parish boundaries of Chorley St Lawrence Parish:

- 1835

- 1851

Chorley [St Laurence] is an Ecclesiastical Parish [as of 1630] and a market town in the county of Lancashire.

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. "CHORLEY St Lawrence, a market-town and a parish, and the head of a union, in the hundred of Leyland, N. division of the county of Lancaster, 32 miles south by east of Lancaster.

"Chorley was originally a chapelry in the parish of Croston, from which it was separated in 1793, when that extensive district was divided into three distinct parishes. St. George's church, standing in an open area, on the east side of the town, was completed in October, 1825; attached is a large burial-ground. There are places of worship for Independents, Wesleyans, Primitive Methodists, Baptists, Unitarians, and the Roman Catholic chapel, was dedicated to St. Gregory, and was built in 1774."

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.

Online index of Lancashire Births, Marriages and Deaths Lancashire BMD

Lancashire Online Parish Clerks
An extremely useful resource for research in Lancashire Parishes http://www.lan-opc.org.uk/

Church records
Online Records

Blackburn St Mary is an ancient parish with chapelries totalling about 45. The following chart lists those chapelry and parish registers which have thus far been transcribed and posted online in some format. Click the years to view online data for each church for the pertinent years you are trying to search. Original parish registers, Bishop’s transcripts and some transcribed church records exist for this parish, and including additional records such as parish chest records. These are held at the Lancashire Record Office, in Preston, Lancashire or, be sure to view a Comprehensive List of Chapels in Blackburn St Mary Parish (click the link for each church which takes you directly to the Family History Library online catalog for available microfilms to original registers).

[Note: the following web sites have online data content for those chapels as indicated below--

FS= FamilySearch; LOPC = Lancashire Online Parish Clerk; AC = Ancestry.co.uk]

Census records
Chorley's census records for the years 1841, 1851 and 1881 have been indexed and the data posted online at Lancashire's Online Parish Clerk and at FamilySearch. To view these, click the following years:


 * 1841
 * 1851
 * 1881

http://www.1881pubs.com/ for details of public houses in the 1881 census

Poor Law Unions
Chorley Poor Law Union, Lancashire

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
Maps are a visual look at the locations in England. Gazetteers contain brief summaries about a place.


 * England Jurisdictions 1851
 * Vision of Britain