Sedgley, Staffordshire Genealogy

Guide to Sedgley, Staffordshire ancestry, family history, and genealogy: parish registers, census records, birth records, marriage records, and death records.

Parish History
Sedgley All Saints is an Ancient Parish in the county of Staffordshire. The ancient parish had nine townships: Sedgley, Gornal (traditionally divided into Upper and Lower), Woodsetton, Coseley, Ettingshall, Cotwall End, Gospel End, Brierley (later Bradley).

SEDGLEY (All Saints), a parish, in the union of Dudley, N. division of the hundred of Seisdon, S.division of the county of Stafford, 3 miles (N.) from Dudley. There are places of worship belonging to Particular Baptists, Wesleyans, Primitive Methodists, Independents, Presbyterians, and Roman Catholics.

All Saints' Church is a parish church which is situated in the town centre. The first All Saints' Church was built during the 12th century but the current structure was completed in 1829 and has a capacity to seat more than 1,300 people. Seating was reduced first in 1882, and the church now holds a few hundred. The organ which was fitted in the church on its completion had originally been in Westminster Abbey. The church is located on the corner of Vicar Street and Dean Street, with the modern vicarage and church hall on the opposite side of Vicar Street.

At the time, it was the only parish church in the large but relatively lightly populated parish of Sedgley, but the parish was later divided into five ecclesiastical districts - Sedgley, Lower Gornal, Upper Gornal, Ettingshall and Coseley. Each of these newly-created parishes had their own church.

The place name Sedgley was first mentioned in a 985 charter from King Æthelred to Lady Wulfrūn, when describing the Wolverhampton border. The original Old English place name was 'Secg's lēah' - Secg being a personal name (meaning sword bearing man or warrior) and lēah meaning wood, glade or woodland clearing (so, the lēah belonging to Secg).

In 1897, the villages of Coseley, Ettingshall and Brierley broke away from the Manor of Sedgley to form the Coseley Urban District Council. At the same time, Sedgley Urban District Council was formed to include the rest of the manor, apart from Gospel End - which then became part of Seisdon Rural District, although it is still part of the Sedgley DY3 postal district. The entire area was part of the Wolverhampton Parliamentary Borough, created in 1832.

Sedgley Urban District Council survived until 1966 when the majority of the area became part of Dudley County Borough, which at the same time also took in the urban district councils of Coseley and Brierley Hill. Some parts of Sedgley were placed in South Staffordshire and Wolverhampton, while small sections of Coseley became part of Sandwell and Wolverhampton.

Sedgley developed from a village into a town after World War I when thousands of residential and commercial properties were developed across the area by the council and by private developers. Most of the houses in Sedgley were built in the 1950s and 1960s, in response to the development of Baggeridge Colliery which closed on March 2, 1968. The land was bought by Seisdon Rural District Council and it was granted country park status in 1970. On January 12, 1981, full reclamation of the land commenced.

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.

See West Midlands BMD and Staffordshire BMD

Church records
Sedgley parish registers of christenings, marriages and burials are available online for the following years:

To find the names of the neighboring parishes, use England Jurisdictions 1851 Map. In this site, search for the name of the parish, click on the location "pin", click Options and click List contiguous parishes.

Records are also available at the Staffordshive Record Office.

Census records

 * 1532/3 - A List of Families in 1532/3

Poor Law Unions
Dudley Poor Law Union, Staffordshire

Probate records
Records of wills, administrations, inventories, indexes, etc. were filed by the court with jurisdiction over this parish. Go to Staffordshire 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.


 * http://maps.familysearch.org/
 * Vision of Britain

Websites
http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/STS/Sedgley/index.html