Winlaton, Durham Genealogy

Guide to Winlaton, Durham family history and genealogy: parish registers, transcripts, census records, birth records, marriage records, and death records.

Parish History
WINLATON (St. Paul), a parish, in the union of Gateshead, E division of Chester ward, N division of the county of Durham, 5 miles WSW from Newcastle-upon-Tyne. There are places of worship for Wesleyans, Presbyterians, Primitive Methodists, Methodists of the New Connexion; and four parochial schools, in connexion with the National Society.

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
Winlaton 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 Durham County Record Office.

Non Conformist Churches

 * Independent/Congregational
 * Methodist New Connexion
 * Presbyterians
 * Primitive Methodist
 * Wesleyan Methodist
 * Wesleyans

Poor Law Unions

 * Gateshead Poor Law Union, Durham

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

Sir Ambrose Crowley
Ambrose Crowley began his career in the seventeenth century in Stourbridge, where his father, another Ambrose Crowley, had built up a big iron business. After his mother’s death, family circumstances changed: his father remarried and becames a Quaker. The young Ambrose left in 1689, taking with him expertise gathered in the iron trade. He began in London, he gathers capital to invest in the North-East: first in Sunderland, then at Winlaton, on the fast-flowing Derwent (a tributary of the Tyne). Using the cheap shipping from London to Sunderland (ships were travelling in ballast) he developed in Sunderland an iron nail works. Traditionally iron nails were a Midlands manufacture.

During the period 1707-9 his undertakings in Co. Durham contained two slitting mills, two forges, four steel furnaces, many warehouses, and innumerable smithies producing a wide variety of ironmongery.

From entry for Sir Ambrose Crowley in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography:

He imports iron from Sweden and converts it to a variety of artefacts that he sends to London, where he has a warehouse at Greenwich and a shop, the “Doublet”, in Thames Street.

He went on to become the biggest ironmonger in the London, with contracts to supply all the naval dockyards.Knighthood and a career in politics followed.The firm which Crowley founded was continued by his son John and by his grandsons and lasted well into the reign of Queen Victoria, prospering from all the wars in the century following his death in 1713.