Macclesfield, St Paul, Cheshire Genealogy

Guide to Macclesfield St Paul, Cheshire ancestry, family history, and genealogy: parish registers, transcripts, census records, birth records, marriage records, and death records.

Parish History
MACCLESFIELD, is a market-town, parochial chapelry, and a newly-enfranchised borough, having separate jurisdiction, it is locally in the parish of Prestbury, and hundred of Macclesfield, and the head of a union, in the Northern division of the county of Chester. The town is pleasantly situated near the southern extremity of the forest.

The parochial chapelry consists of the nine townships of Hurdsfield, Kettleshulme , Macclesfield , Macclesfield Forest , Pott-Shrigley , Rainow , Sutton , Wildboar-Clough , and Wincle. The parochial chapel, dedicated to St. Michael, and is dependent on the mother church at Prestbury.

Christchurch, was erected in 1775, at the expense of Charles Roe.

In the year 1844, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners endowed two church districts St. Paul's and St. Peter's, Macclesfield, and the districts then became ecclesiastical parishes. There are places of worship for the Society of Friends, Independents, Primitive Methodists, Socinians, and Roman Catholics.

St. Paul's was built 1843-4 as part of a government scheme to build churches in the new urban areas. They are known as Commissioners' Churches or Waterloo Churches. There was a grant of £1,000 to the total cost of £5,400. The earliest Commissioners' churches were fully funded but this led to some extravagance and excess. The rules were changed so that the local community had to raise part of the money and the grant would not cover a tower. St. Paul's is built of stone from Kerridge.

Church records
Macclesfield, St Paul 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 Cheshire Archives and Local Studies

Non-Conformist Churches

 * Society of Friends
 * Independent
 * Primitive Methodists
 * Socinians
 * Roman Catholics

Civil Registration
Birth, marriages and deaths were kept by the government, from 1 July 1837 to the present day. The civil registration article tells more about these records. Here are two excellent Internet sites with birth, marriage and death indexes available:


 * FreeBMD
 * Cheshire BMD

Registration Districts

 * Macclesfield

Poor Law Unions

 * Macclesfield

Probate records
Records of wills, administrations, inventories, indexes, etc. were filed by the court with jurisdiction over this parish. Go to Cheshire Probate Records to find the name of the court having primary jurisdiction. Scroll down in the article to the section Court Jurisdictions by Parish.

see also England Cheshire Probate Records - FamilySearch Historical Records

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
Macclesfield St Paul on GENUKI

Macclesfield on GENUKI