Kingswinford St Mary, Staffordshire Genealogy

Guide to Kingswinford St Mary, Staffordshire ancestry, family history, and genealogy: parish registers, census records, birth records, marriage records, and death records.

Parish History
SWINFORD, KING'S (Holy Trinity), a parish, in the union of Stourbridge, N. division of the hundred of Seisdon, S. division of the county of Stafford, 3 miles (W. by S.) from Dudley. This parish, which is situated on the roads from Dudley to Stourbridge, and from Wolverhampton to Worcester.

The church, erected in 1831, on a site at Wordsley and, by a special act of Parliament, has been made the mother church. The former parish church, dedicated to St. Mary, and now a chapel, is an ancient edifice. There are churches at BrierlyHill, Brockmoor, Pensnett, and Quarry-Bank. The Baptists, Independents, Primitive Methodists, and Wesleyans, have places of worship. .

When Wordsley Holy Trinity, Staffordshire was built and formed as a parish in 1831 St Mary became a chapel of ease within that parish and the St Mary records were transferred to Holy Trinity. Subsequently the old St Mary building was rebuilt. Other places in the parish include: Stourbridge, Wollescott, Wollescote, and Upper Swinford. After the rebuilding of the church it became, in 1846, a separate 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.

See West Midlands BMD and Staffordshire BMD

Church records
Kingswinford St Mary 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 Staffordshive Record Office.

Poor Law Unions
Stourbridge Poor Law Union, Worcestershire

Probate records
Records of wills, administrations, inventories, indexes, etc. were filed by the court with jurisdiction over this parish. Go to Staffordshire 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
http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/STS/Kingswinford/index.html