* English County Boundaries

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Jane
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English County Boundaries

Post by Jane »

While checking my Geocoding I came across this handy map set which show the Historic and new Ceremonial Counties of England.

http://communities.maps.arcgis.com/apps ... acf55108ac
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AdrianBruce
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Re: English County Boundaries

Post by AdrianBruce »

Thanks for that - interesting to see how little Staffordshire and Shropshire have changed (from a ceremonial v historic viewpoint).
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Re: English County Boundaries

Post by tatewise »

I've added that to the research:useful_research_web_sites#general_sites|> Useful Research Web Sites > England & Wales > General Sites.
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Re: English County Boundaries

Post by Wilfreda99 »

:D That's brilliant, already found the answer to a question about the varying size of my parish (its right up to the county boundary on one side so no doubt). Don't suppose there is anything similar out there for parishes?
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Re: English County Boundaries

Post by mjashby »

You can find a great deal of parish information including outline maps via: https://familysearch.org/wiki/en/Main_Page , e.g. by clicking on the various links and selecting Europe > England > County > Parish

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Re: English County Boundaries

Post by Gowermick »

Be warned, this implies there are only two Counties:- Historic and Ceremonial. Unfortunately this is not the case. Changes to Historic Counties have occured throughout history.
Whilst this site may be useful, just remember it is not the whole story, as County boundaries tended to meander over time.
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Re: English County Boundaries

Post by tatewise »

Ditto GRO Registration Districts.
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Re: English County Boundaries

Post by Gowermick »

Quite right Mike. Even Phillimores guide gets it wrong, because it shows how things were at a specific point in time. If one looks at Warrington, it is currently in Cheshire Unitary Authority. My Barthomews Gazetteer, (1986) shows it the County of Cheshire. Whereas Phillimore's guide to Parishes lists it under Lancashire (where it once was!).

For those not aware, if one clicks on the registration district in FreeBMD, one can get a report showing which parishes were in the district at a particular point in time, with dates showing when parishes joined and left the registration district.
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Re: English County Boundaries

Post by tatewise »

Yes, that FreeBMD feature is very useful, but strictly speaking it is linking to the http://www.ukbmd.org.uk/reg/ pages of REGISTRATION DISTRICTS IN ENGLAND AND WALES.
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Re: English County Boundaries

Post by Pentris »

Neither of these maps show the 'true' counties as of today. I live in North Somerset which is a county in its own right and has been for around 20 years. This was previously part of Avon which covered what is now Bristol, North Somerset, Bath and North East Somerset and South Gloucestershire. Somerset was split into North Somerset, Bath and North East Somerset and a much smaller version of Somerset. I personally cannot see how this 'ceremonial' county is much use to family historians.
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Re: English County Boundaries

Post by AdrianBruce »

Um. There is no such thing as a "true" county.

Today we can refer to Historic Counties, Ceremonial Counties and Administrative Counties (or their equivalents - Wikipedia says that North Somerset is actually a unitary authority area - I am never quite sure whether a UUA is a county equivalent or whether there is an entry in the list of counties that corresponds to the UUA but otherwise has no organisational existence). (I'm lumping Metropolitan / Non-Met etc in as Admin Counties)

In the past there have been Postal Counties, Registration Counties (or do they still exist?) and Counties Corporate (a.k.a. Counties of Themselves).

Go back far enough and the Historic Counties were the administrative counties - except for the bits chewed out by counties corporate.

There are probably other types and I've probably got my English in a knot over Counties Corporate but I'm sure it can't be County Corporates.

It is entirely up to the genealogist which they want to use, of course. Personally I'd agree that today's Ceremonial Counties don't seem to have much relevance to genealogical events, not least from the difficulty of finding the CC at any particular point in time. But if anyone feels they have use....

We've discussed whether to use Counties Corporate in FHUG in the past. Those who feel attached to concepts like the City & County of Bristol will use them - personally, while Bristol isn't a problem to me, other Counties Corporate definitely are - I'd be using the City & County of Chester, which is a hugely different concept to the County of Chester, which is a slightly more formal name for Cheshire, but confusingly close to the City & County of Chester.
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Re: English County Boundaries

Post by Peter Collier »

Because nothing is ever easy, the situation is different in each of the home nations. My knowledge on Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland is limited; but as far as England is concerned, I can say for sure that Unitary Authorities are established in law as counties. Therefore, if you prefer to use only administrative geography, then from 1 April 1998 you would have to place the town of Torquay in the County of Torbay, not Devon.

To keep it nice and confusing, UA counties also have districts just like the larger, two-tier, non-metropolitan counties. However, each UA county has but one single district, which is coterminous with the county. The councils in UA areas are at this lower, district level. In other words, although the UAs are counties they are administered by a District (or Borough) Council.

There are of course exceptions:

All of Berkshire is administered by UAs. With UAs being separate counties in their own right, this would mean that what had been the county of Berkshire hitherto would have disappeared once the UAs were created. However, as the county had a special title ("Royal County of Berkshire"), which they wished to preserve, they needed to preserve the original (1972) county. Therefore, as an exception to the general rule, Berkshire's six UAs are only districts, not counties.

A similar situation exists in the Metropolitan Counties. These had their county-level administrations abolished in the mid-1980s, but the counties themselves were left intact. So while the administration of Birmingham, for example, is superficially indistinguishable from a UA, the city is not a county in its own right; it is part of the County of the West Midlands.

Greater London is a little messy too, in that - as far as I can tell - there is no county per se. The administrative counties of Middlesex and London were abolished in 1965 and replaced by an administrative area called Greater London, which also absorbed neighbouring parts of Surrey, Kent, Essex, and Hertfordshire. The legislation however specifically did not establish Greater London as a county.

Finally, there are two sui generis areas. The first is the City of London (the "square mile"), which is the last of the mediaeval Counties Corporate still in existence. The other is the Isles of Scilly, which have been administered separately from Cornwall since about 1890. Legally, the council there is a Rural District Council (per the 1888 Local Government Act). These two authorities were preserved by the 1972 Local Government Act, which otherwise abolished all of the local government areas then in existence in the UK outside of Greater London.
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Re: English County Boundaries

Post by AdrianBruce »

Peter Collier wrote:... To keep it nice and confusing, UA counties also have districts just like the larger, two-tier, non-metropolitan counties. However, each UA county has but one single district, which is coterminous with the county. The councils in UA areas are at this lower, district level. ...
Phew - thank you Peter. That all sounds confusing enough to be true.... ;)

As an aside, sort of, these sorts of issues are why I don't like the frequent American genealogists' ideas of setting the place-name to the relevant jurisdictional area. I have never confirmed this with the legislation but I have a feeling (seemingly backed up by GENUKI) that for much of its existence, my home town of Crewe had Crewe Borough Council administering the area called Monks Coppenhall Civil Parish. It all seems to get a bit confusing so I take my place-names from the settlements. If, on the other hand, you have settlements with a short life span, you may conclude differently.

Tracing London (the Metropolis, not the City of ...) is also "fun". I found on the Histpop site, a map indicating that the 1851 census authorities had defined an area as "London" for their purposes, even though there was no single body covering that area. So it's not just us that struggle with the question, "What is London?"
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Re: English County Boundaries

Post by Peter Collier »

I think rigidly applying only one framework to your placenames is always going to cause problems, because there are always exceptions. Everyone just needs to find an internally consistent system that best suits the locations and times they are covering.

For my part, the first/lowest part of any place hirearchy will be the name by which a settlement was commonly known at that time by the people who lived there, if I can determine that. Sometimes that is not always possible, and I have to use a more general parish or district name.

My second level is the county, and I use the administrative units that existed at the time in question. If nothing else, you need to know where official records might be stored and that is going to depend on the (local) government agency that created the record at the time, not some long-since vanished hedgerow, vaguely defined 900 years previously by some Saxon or other and held out now by the ABC as "the only true county". Sometimes, when it comes to counties, I have to bend the rules a little. For example, referring back to my last post, I will use Greater London as a "county", even though it isn't, simply because that is the most practical thing to do.

I use a third level for states and provinces, since my wife's half of the tree is American, and I have a sprinkling of Canadians, Australians, and Germans to cater for also. And then finally, at the fourth level, I have the country as it was at the time of the record/event. Depending on the age of the record, for example, a place in England might be listed as "...England", "...Great Britain", or "...United Kingdom". That is, I'll grant you, overly pedantic for England, but definitely not for some places I have to cover in Central Europe or North America, and I think overall consistency is crucial!

Finally, I enter the modern-day details as the standardised place name so I can tie everything together. It's surprising how often through history some places actually "move"!
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