Precinct of the Savoy, Middlesex Genealogy

Guide to Precinct of the Savoy, Middlesex ancestry, family history, and genealogy: Parish registers, transcripts, census records, birth records, marriage records, and death records.

Parish History
LANCASTER (DUCHY OF), a liberty in Strand district, Middlesex; forming part of the metropolis; and lying partly in the precinct of the Savoy and St Clement Danes, but mostly in the parish of St. Mary-le-Strand. It includes the site of the palace of the Earls and Dukes of Lancaster.

Additional information:

The Savoy Chapel or the Queen's Chapel of the Savoy is a chapel off the Strand, London, dedicated to St John the Baptist. It was originally built in the medieval era off the main church of the Savoy Palace (later the Savoy Hospital). The Hospital was in ruins by the 19th century, and the Chapel was the only part to survive demolition.

The original chapel was within Peter of Savoy's palace, and was destroyed with it in the Peasants' Revolt in 1381. The present Chapel building was constructed in the 1490s (and finished in 1512) by Henry VII as a side chapel off his Hospital's 200-foot (61 m) long nave (this nave was secular rather than sacred, held 100 beds, and was demolished in the 19th century).

The chapel has been the host to various other congregations, most especially that of St Mary-le-Strand whilst it had no church building of its own 1549–1714. Also the German Lutheran congregation of Westminster (now at Sandwich Street and Thanet Street, near St Pancras[1]) was granted royal permission to worship here, when it split from Holy Trinity (the City of London Lutheran congregation, now at St Anne and St Agnes).[2] The new congregation's first pastor, Irenaeus Crusius (previously an associate at Holy Trinity), dedicated the chapel on the 19th Sunday after Trinity 1694 as the Marienkirche or the German Church of St. Mary-Le-Savoy.

As an Anglican church, the chapel has been noted in the 18th century as a place where marriages without banns might illegally occur,[3] and was referred to in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited as "the place where divorced couples got married in those days – a poky little place".

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
Precinct of the Savoy 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 London Metropolitan Archives.

1634-1900 Rate Books

 * Westminster Rate Books at findmypast - (£).

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

Manorial Records

 * Records survive for Savoy Manor (1601-1884). The Manorial Documents Register will help you locate these 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
Precinct of the Savoy in St May Le Strand on GENUKI