England | Contents & Site Map | Towns & Parishes | Information related to all of Derbyshire | What's New |
"DERBYSHIRE, midland county of England [Map (above) shows location], having Yorkshire on the north, Notts on the east, Leicestershire, Warwickshire, and Staffordshire on the south and Staffordshire and Cheshire on the west; length, north and south, 52 miles; greatest breadth, 85 miles; average breadth, 20 miles; area, 658,624 acres; pop. 461,914. The surface in the south is either flat or undulating, irregular in the middle and NE., and picturesquely mountainous in the NW. or Peak district. The principal rivers are the Trent, Derwent, Dove, and Wye; river communication is supplemented by the Erewash and Grand Trunk Canals. The road and railway systems are highly developed. The soil in the Vale of the Trent is alluvial and very productive. In the hilly districts the land is mostly in pasture; much of it is rocky and unproductive. Oats, barley, potatoes, and wheat are cultivated; and there are many excellent dairy-farms. Warm mineral springs are numerous, the most popular being those at Buxton, Matlock, and Bakewell. Coal is abundant; iron ore and lead are worked; among the other mineral products are zinc, manganese, and barytes. There are numerous and extensive quarries of limestone and marble; fluor-spar is found in the caverns, and is manufactured into a great variety of ornamental articles. Silk, cotton, and lace are the chief manufactures, but malting and brewing are also carried on, and there are some extensive iron foundries." [Bartholemew's Gazetteer of the British Isles, 1887]
His work is part of The New England Online Books Effort, and please note his work is available mainly as G4TIFF images for viewing offline. Although some portions have been OCR'd, more volunteers are needed for both scanning, and to produce text, or web page versions.
Note on using IGI Batch Numbers:
It is not always easy to locate your ancestors in the IGI using the search mechanisms provided at the above LDS site. Manually typing the batch numbers into the IGI search screen can be tedious. Hugh Wallis has made an exhaustive search of the likely ranges of batch numbers and created a database of those numbers and the source records that they apply to. A very powerful feature included is a hotlink from each batch number to the actual search engine provided at the Family Search site, including the ability to enter the surname you are looking for. This makes it very easy to search all the batches for a particular geographic location using just the last name you are searching for - something that is not possible directly from the LDS site without doing a lot of typing. This is Hugh Wallis's site.
DERBYSHIRE REGISTER OFFICES, September 2000
The following eight Register Offices for Derbyshire all have different
opening hours. None of them has email facility. Telephone is the
simplest method of contact. Fax may be used for enquiries and
searches only. For obtaining certificates, please clarify payment details
with the office concerned.
Note: Certificates of birth, death and marriage can be obtained locally only from the Register Office for the District in which they were issued - or if the District no longer exists, the Office to which its registers have been moved.
If ordering from a District Office, please note the following:
You can obtain a GRO reference in several ways:-
Admission to the museum is by appointment only, please contact:-
The Curator,
HM Prison Service Museum,
Newbold Revel,
Rugby,
CV23 0TH
Tel: 01788 834168
[Information compiled from "The Penal Lexicon Home Page", formerly at www.penlex.org.uk/pages/index.html.]
Kain, R.J.P., Oliver, R.R., Historic Maps of England and Wales: Boundaries before 1850. Available on CD from History Data Service, UK Data Archive, 17 May 2001. SN: 4348.
David Hawgood has produced Maps of Derbyshire with Braille labels (large print labels) to help people with visual disabilities, with similar Tactile and large print Maps for other English counties.
There is an article on David's website, Production of Tactile maps with Braille labels explaining how these maps have been produced.
Links to Newspapers' sites are provided not only for the Newspaper content, but also because they may contain links to other items or sites of local interest.
The Regency Collection has a section on Postal History, and also includes other interesting material relating to the Regency period - e.g. Turnpike Trusts, Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire, and more.
Although recusancy in Derbyshire was concentrated in a small number of parishes, virtually all parishes made a return for the two years in question, although for most the return is Nil. The parishes featuring a large concentration usually had the common factor of a member of the Catholic gentry living there, or possessing large estates. For instance, Ashbourne had the Pegges & Whitehalls; Hassop, the Eyres; Barlborough & Eckington, the Poles; Norbury, the Fitzherberts; West Hallam & Wingerworth, the Hunlokes.
Tideswell, Wormhill and Hathersage are the exceptions, where the origins of Catholicism can be traced back to influence of Catholic gentry during Elizabeth I's reign. In Tideswell, these were Bishop Robert PURSGLOVE (c1503-1580), and William FIELDSEND (the rector between 1551 and 1576); in the case of Hathersage, the EYRE and FITZHERBERT families.
Purchasing details are available in the list of Derbyshire Record Society Publications.
Derbyshire Hearth Tax Assessments, 1662-70.The volume lists the names of heads of households, and the number of hearths they were taxed for.
Edited by David G. Edwards. 1982.
- ISBN 0 9505940 9 1.
[Beginning on 12th March 1999 - maintained previously by Clive Henly.]
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