Gwennap, Cornwall Genealogy

Guide to Gwennap, Cornwall ancestry, family history, and genealogy: parish registers, transcripts, census records, birth records, marriage records, and death records.

Parish History
GWENNAP (St. Wenap), a parish, in the union of Redruth, E. division of the hundred of Kerrier, W. division of Cornwall, 8 miles E from Truro. There are places of worship for Baptists, Bryanites, and Wesleyans.

Gwennap St Wennepa is an Ancient Parish in the county of Cornwall. Other places in the parish include: Carharrack, Crofthandy, and Frogpool.

Gwennap Pit where John Wesley preached 18 times between 1762 and 1789, although Gwennap Pit is to the north west at the hamlet of Busveal near St. Day. The pit was caused by mining subsidence in the mid-eighteenth century. After Wesley's death the local people turned the pit into a regular circular shape with turf seats.

The parish church is an old foundation but was rebuilt in the 15th century and then thoroughly restored in the 19th century. The tower is detached. According to Charles Henderson "few Cornish churches are less interesting than Gwennap" [Cornish Church Guide (1925); pp. 105-06]



Civil Registration
Births, 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
Gwennap 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 Cornwall Record Office.

Cornwall Online Parish Clerks
An extremely useful resource is the Cornwall Online Parish Clerks. Sandra Pritchard also maintains her website http://gwennap-opc.com/index.html with transcriptions of the parish

Census records
Cornwall Online Census Project

Poor Law Unions
Redruth Poor Law Union

Probate records
Records of wills, administrations, inventories, indexes, etc. were filed by the court with jurisdication over this parish. Go to Cornwall 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
There are many maps and gazetteers showing English places. Valuable web sites are:


 * England Jurisdictions 1851
 * Vision of Britain

Websites
Gwennap in GENUKI