St Germans, Cornwall Genealogy

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

Parish History
GERMANS, ST. (St. Germanus), a parish, the head of a union, and formerly a representative borough and a market-town, in the S. division of the hundred of East, E. division of Cornwall, 9 miles WNW from Devonport, and 227 WSW from London.

St Germans (Cornish: Lannales) is an Ancient Parish in the county of Cornwall. Other places in the parish include: Cross, Deviock, Downderry, Minerd, Rowle, Seaton, and Terulefoot.

It takes its name from the St. German's Priory Church of St Germanus. This ancient Norman church is adjacent to the Port Eliot estate of the present Earl of St Germans. The other villages in the historic parish were Tideford, Hessenford, Minard Cross, Polbathick, and Bethany but new ecclesiastical parishes were established in 1834 )Hessenford, Cornwall and 1852 Tideford, Cornwall. In 1997 part of the St Germans parish was made into Deviock parish.

St Germans was originally the seat of the Bishop of Cornwall before the see was combined with that of Crediton in 1042. Today the Bishop of Truro's assistant bishop is known as the Bishop of St Germans in acknowledgement of this, although he has no specific links with the village.

The present church replaces a Saxon building which was the cathedral of the Bishops of Cornwall. The monastery was reorganized by the Bishop of Exeter between 1161 and 1184 as an Augustinian priory and the new church was built on a grand scale, with two western towers and a nave of 102 ft. The western doorway is particularly ornate and is carved from elvan quarried at Landrake.

The church is dedicated to St Germanus and soon after construction it became the Cathedral for Cornwall in 926 AD, when King Athelstan appointed Conan as the bishop of Cornwall. The bishopric was to be short-lived, however, as it was transferred to Crediton in 1042 AD.

A monastery grew alongside the church, and this remained until the Reformation when the monastery became a private house, home to the Eliot family, in whose hands the house remains. A number of the Eliot family are interred in the church.

At Dupath Well the wellhouse is said to have been built in 1510 by the monks of St Germans.

St Germans parish is still the largest in Cornwall and some of the original Norman features remain, including the large arched doorway.

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 Free BMD.

Church records
St Germans 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 page for the parish. In addition the Online Parish Clerk for St Germans has contributed to the website with other parishes in the Rame peninsula Rame, Cornwall Maker, Cornwall &amp; Sheviock, Cornwall

Census records
Cornwall Online Census Project

Poor Law Unions
St Germans Poor Law Union

Probate records
Records of wills, administrations, inventories, indexes, etc. were filed by the court with jurisdiction 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 websites are:


 * England Jurisdictions 1851
 * Vision of Britain

Websites
St Germans in GENUKI