Parish/District Boundaries around Lydbrook area (General)

by Jefff , West London, Middlesex, Saturday, August 25, 2012, 16:12 (4256 days ago) @ sarah phelps

Hi again Sarah,
as far as I'm aware the national boundary between England and Wales in our area hasn't changed, it was and still is the traditional physical one of the River Wye. However what has changed is the local population has increased dramatically due to influx of workers as the industrial revolution "took off", this affected the Forest as a whole and Lydbrook in particular. As the population expanded so the local government (civic) Districts and Ecclesiastical Parishes changed & multiplied & their various boundaries with them. This makes family history research somewhat confusing, or at least that's what I found. I stand to be corrected but my rough understanding is this:

In the early days say late 1700s, before the population really "exploded", there was no church at Lydbrook itself, so we need to look at the PRs of churches such as nearby Bicknor, Walford, Ruardean & Newland. Indeed some Lydbrook folk crossed the Wye every Sunday to attend the nearest church at Welsh Bicknor. Lydbrook Church wasn't "opened" until 1851. This general lack of "normal" C of E Churches within the Forest is why the PRs show so many apparently different places of worship & religions, such as the Chapels & Circuits of various Methodists, Baptists, etc; this all confused & intrigued me having been brought up a standard C of E lad with no exposure or knowledge of Dean's rich religious history !
Before this the nearest sizable towns, which had existed for centuries so were the main local "civic centres", were Westbury On Severn to the east in England, and Monmouth to the West and just inside Wales.

In 1842 the Forest was split into West Dean & East Dean Townships for local government purposes. http://www.forum.forest-of-dean.net/index.php?id=1422

Hence Lydbrook was now governed from Monmouth just a few miles away and just across the national border, hence the local Census's and BMD records suggest Lydbrook people to be "Welsh", regardless of their true ancestral roots (altho clearly a lot of the Lydbrook workers may well have come across from nearby Wales, there's certainly a lot of us Jones' there !.)

Subsequently as the population within the Forest continued to grow, and towns such as Coleford expanded and new towns such as Cinderford were created, so the civic boundaries had to change too and new names of Civic Districts came along. At the same time new Churches were being built so new Parishes created.

The best way I've found to understand this is using the excellent Genuki site
http://www.ukbmd.org.uk/genuki/reg/districts/monmouth.html

And for a good and interesting history of Lydbrook and explanation of the Parish Boundaries http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydbrook

I do hope this helps you Sarah ? I must say when I first started in this hobby two years ago, the worst problem for me was trying to know where to lookup my records !? - what with the Forest in general and my dad's "home" area of Lydbrook in particular being located at the junction of two countries, four counties and Parishes & Districts that changed name too often for my liking !!
This wasn't helped by the fact that my childhood and even later years was in the Eastern side of the Forest, born in Cinderford, often travelling east towards Ross & Gloster etc for shopping trips and visiting relatives. Yes my Gran was in Lydbrook, but I'd not realised this was anywhere near Wales as such. That said, when I applied for my Driving Test in 1980 we had to travel to Monmouth to take it, a hint that Monmouth used to be a far more important centre for local government etc than might appear nowadays.
On t'other side of the coin, my sister lives nr Coleford and married a Coleford chap who, for his shopping and social trips, tended to travel west into Monmouth and beyond where his family background lay.

This makes me even more appreciate our great fortune in having this wonderfull internet site which manages to pull everything together into one central resource, thanks yet again to this site's owners and administrators !