Bath Abbey, Somerset Genealogy

England Somerset



Parish History
Jointly with Wells, Bath is the head of a diocese comprising very nearly the whole of the county of Somerset; the income of the bishop is £5000. The parish of St. Peter and St. Paul, or the Abbey parish, and the parish of St. James, form a rectory, with the vicarage of Lyncombe and Widcombe (which see) annexed: the living is valued in the king's books at £20. 17. 11.; net income, £750; patrons, the Trustees of the Rev. Charles Simeon. The Abbey church is a venerable and finely proportioned cruciform structure, in the later English style, of which it forms one of the purest specimens: from the intersection an irregularly quadrilateral tower rises to the height of 162 feet. It occupies the site, and is built partly with the materials, of the conventional church of the monastery founded by Osric in 676, which had subsisted, under different forms of government, for more than 800 years. This church having become dilapidated, Bishop Oliver King (as it is said, admonished in a dream, of which a memorial is sculptured on the west front,) began to rebuild it in 1495; but dying before it was completed, and the citizens refusing to purchase it from the commissioners of Henry VIII., the walls were left roofless, till Dr. James Montague, bishop of the diocese, aided by a liberal contribution from the nobility and gentry resident in the county, completed it, in the year 1606. The revenue of the monastery, at the Dissolution, was £695. 6. 1¼. The edifice has now, as before noticed, undergone a thorough repair and embellishment at the expense of the corporation; but not in accordance with the simplicity of its original style of architecture. From: 'Basingstoke - Battersby', A Topographical Dictionary of England (1848), pp. 168-177. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=50784 Date accessed: 06 March 2011.

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.

Bath Civil Registration District has a complete index of civil registration from 1837-2007 online through the volunteer effort of Bath BMD,England Marriage registrations post 2007 are added as index become available. There are detailed content tables available.

Church records
Contributor: Include here information for parish registers, Bishop’s Transcripts and other types of church records, such as parish chest records. Add the contact information for the office holding the original records. Add links to the Family History Library Catalog showing the film numbers in their collection

Poor Law Unions
Bath Poor Law Union, Somerset

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

Web sites
Contributor: add any relevant sites that aren’t mentioned above.