Ancoats St James the Less, Lancashire Genealogy

Parish History
Ancoats St James the Less is a chapelry or chapel of ease built in the year 1867. It stood within the boundary of Manchester Our Lady, St George and St Denys] Cathedral and Ancient Parish.

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.

Online index of Lancashire Births, Marriages and Deaths Lancashire BMD

Church records
Online Records Church of England

Ancoats St James the Less Chapelry and all its additional contemporary chapelries (5 others), possessed chapelry registers of baptisms, marriages and burials. These have been indexed or transcribed and are available online at no cost, as follows:

Ancoats St James the Less is one of six chapels comprising the township, Ancoats; and it was one of at least 150 chapels in total, comprising the whole of Manchester Parish's boundary (by 1880).

The 'mother' or ancient parish of Manchester City is the Cathedral of Manchester, called Our Lady, St George and St Denys Cathedral.

If you do not locate your ancestor in the list of Ancoats chapelry links and in Manchester Cathedral links listed above, be certain before you research in any other Lancashire parish, you include a thorough search into all of Manchester City's attached chapelries (over 150 of them)! Unfortunately, Manchester Cathedral (the parish) is England's largest parish; thus each chapelry's baptism, marriage and burial registers (where extant) must be searched. To help you identify all of Manchester's chapelries, and then search what's online for each one of Manchester City's chapelries and district churches--view a complete list of all its chapels--HERE (scroll down to "Church Records").

Poor Law Unions
Manchester Poor Law Union

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