Marriages in BRISTOL (General)

by peteressex , Friday, October 14, 2011, 17:41 (4792 days ago) @ Jefff

www.visionofbritain.org.uk/place/place_page.jsp?p_id=843 may help. So might www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/GLS/Bristol/index.html. Or not. Between them they correctly quote the position in 1679, 1830, and 1887 as putting most of Bristol in Gloucestershire for various purposes. Unfortunately they also quote incorrect data.

It is necessary to distinguish geographical counties from postal areas (now no longer necessary because we have postcodes) and from administrative areas including administrative counties and county boroughs or other municipalities such as "city and county of...."

Bristol was created the early equivalent of a County Borough in 1373, and some say this is what made it a city, but you couldn't then be a city unless you had a cathedral. Until the administrative county of Avon was created in 1975, Bristol thus had its own civic status, but it was divided for geographical purposes between Gloucestershire, where the majority lay, and Somerset. That's how Gloucestershire's "county ground" comes to be in Bristol. It was not unusual, and it still isn't, to find a river forming a county boundary, and the Bristol Avon was no exception.

It threw me for a while when I found an ancestor's address listed on a foreign website as "Clifton, Gloucester." It meant Gloucestershire. Unhelpfully, the Cliston Suspension Bridge joined Gloucestershire and Somerset. Confusion is unsurprising. In the same way, before the creation of the London County Council in the late 19th century, counties such as Middlesex (which no longer exists administratively at all, but does postally)and Surrey ran right up to the City. That's how Middlesex CCC came to have its home at Lord's, and how the Surrey Docks were so named, whereas now they are both in London. Middlesex Guildhall is still so called, right there opposite Big Ben, but has no civic function, whilst Surrey persists in having its County Hall in Kingston-upon-Thames, which is in London administratively but Surrey postally. Ancestry researchers have probably shared my faintly amusing experience of finding fazed websites listing Gloucestershire people as having been born at "Strand, Middlesex" and in "London, Somerset." Before the National Archives at Kew (London, formerly Surrey) came into existence, the national records of births, marriages and deaths were kept at Somerset House in the Strand in London which was formerly in Middlesex. Bizarre conflicts between geography and genealogy continue to ensue because certificates are misread.

Quite apart from all that, if you ask people from Bristol where they were born, you are unlikely to hear Gloucestershire, Somerset or Avon in the answer. It will be "I'm a Bristolian."