West Bergholt, Essex Genealogy

Guide to West Bergholt, Essex ancestry, family history, and genealogy. Parish registers, transcripts, census records, birth records, marriage records, and death records.

Parish History
West Bergholt is also known as Bergholt, West (St. Mary), it is a parish, in the union of Lexden and Winstree. It is 3½ miles N W of Colchester. There is a place of worship for Wesleyans.

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.

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

Online images are available Seax - Essex Archives Online From the Essex Record Office

Essex Online Parish Clerks (OPC)

Non-conformist Churches

 * 1613-1971 at FamilySearch - How to Use this Collection; index (dates may vary by parish)

Poor Law Unions

 * Lexden and Winstree Poor Law Union, Essex

Few records of vestry government survive. There were three constables 1578 and two surveyors of highways in 1608. The Bergholt Hall manor pound probably lay between the Hall and Lexden Road where Pound field survived in 1843. Stock was rescued from Cooks Hall pound in 1823. The brick-built parish cage stood on a triangle of waste on the crossroads near the White Hart in 1857. It was demolished about 1870.

In 1776 a poor rate raised £100 7s. 6d. Expenditure had nearly doubled by 1783-5 and reached a peak of £831 19s. 8d. in 1801. It fell quite sharply to £249 10s. 10d. in 1804 but then crept upwards again, averaging c. £418 between 1805 and 1823. In 1824 expenditure suddenly leapt to £810 1s. and was generally high throughout the rest of the 1820s. Expenditure in 1830 fell to £234 2s. but averaged c. £581 between 1831 and 1836. Throughout poor relief expenditure per head of population was one of the lowest in the hundred.

The three almshouses 'on the green' in 1768, probably unendowed, may have later become the parish workhouse sited on the heath edge south-west of New Church Road near its junction with Lexden Road. It presumably shut and was demolished c. 1834.

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


 * England Jurisdictions 1851
 * Vision of Britain

Websites
Essex Ancestors - offers images of genealogical records for the county of Essex