Bolventor, Cornwall Genealogy

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

Parish History
BOLVENTOR, a chapelry in Altarnun and St. Neot parishes, Cornwall; 7 miles N of Liskeard railway station, and 9 SW of Launceston. It was created on 24th June 1848 from parts of Altarnun, St Neot and Cardinham parishes. See Genuki for more information.

Bolventor is the location of the famous Jamaica Inn coaching inn. It is bypassed by a dual carriageway section of the A30 trunk road; before the bypass was built the village straddled the A30 road.

Daphne du Maurier, a former resident, chose Bolventor as the setting for her novel about Cornish smugglers titled Jamaica Inn. The inn that inspired the novel has stood beside the main road through the village since 1547. It is now a tourist attraction in its own right and dominates the village.

The small church (dedicated to the Holy Trinity) that lies to the east of the village closed some years ago. A mile from Bolventor there was a chapel of St Luke (from the 13th to the early 16th century): the font is now at the church of Tideford, Cornwall. Bolventor parish was established in 1846 (before that date the village was in St Neot, Cornwall parish) but has now been merged with Altarnun, Cornwall.

The village is said to take its name from the "Bold Venture" that it must have appeared to build a farm in this moorland, but this is probably folk etymology, as "Bol-" is a common prefix in Cornish place names.

Holy Trinity church now redundant is a residential dwelling.

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
Bolventor parish registers of christenings, marriages and burials are available online for the following years:

Records deposited cover 1849-1979, these registers are kept at the County Record Office, County Hall, Truro TR1 3AY.

The Family History Library has parish registers from 1849-1906. Images of parish registers are available online at (browse only images). Images refer to Cornwall Record Office reference: P14.

Cornwall Online Parish Clerks
The Bolventor section of the OPC website contains many records.

Census records
Cornwall Online Census Project

Parts of the parish bordering St Neot may be found on some census enumerations listed in Bolventor, and on other census records as part of St Neot. Therefore a family may have remained in the same place and not be found on a different census unless St Neot is also searched. There are also some with the same circumstance with Altarnun.

Poor Law Unions
Launceston 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
Maps are a visual look at the locations in England. Gazetteers contain brief summaries about a place.


 * England Jurisdictions 1851
 * Vision of Britain

Websites
Bolventor in GENUKI