Altcar, Lancashire Genealogy

England Lancashire  Lancashire Parishes



Parish History
Altcar St Michael is an Ancient Parish in the county of Lancashire. Other places in the parish include: Little Altcar.Great Altcar is a village and civil parish in the West Lancashire District.

Little Altcar is a village and civil parish in the Metropolitan Borough of Sefton on Merseyside, on the West Lancashire Coastal Plain of England. The village has been absorbed into Formby.

The name Altcar is Norse meaning 'marsh by the River Alt'.

The church of St Michael and All Angels is a timber framed structure dating from 1879.

ALTCAR (St. Michael), a parish, in the union of Ormskirk, hundred of West Derby, S. division of the county of Lancaster, 6 miles (W. by S.) from Ormskirk; containing 490 inhabitants. This place seems to be the Acrer of the Domesday survey, at which period it was held by Uctred; it was afterwards held by the abbots of Merivale, and continued with them till the Dissolution, soon after which it was possessed by the family of Molyneux. The parish takes its name from the river Alt, and the word car, meaning low land; and comprises 3582 acres, mostly in meadow and pasture: the surface is level, and the soil partly alluvial and partly a sandy loam containing a mixture of marl. The Alt bounds the parish on the south, having various channels by which the marshes here are drained, and the lower lands thus present the appearance of a Dutch farm with drains and embankments. The grounds are subject to floods, which are carried off by a steam-engine, erected in 1842, the water being thrown into the Alt, which merges into the Irish Sea at Formby Point. A large quantity of hay is produced in the parish; and there is a good stone-quarry, the material of which is used for building purposes. A court baron is held annually in May, and an adjourned court in October. The principal village, called Great Altcar, is a straggling place, consisting chiefly of farmhouses, extending on a slight eminence towards the church, which stands in the western extremity of the parish. Little Altcar is a hamlet adjacent to Formby; and Altcar Hall is an ordinary farmhouse, over the door of which were formerly the arms of the noble family of Molyneux. The living is a perpetual curacy; net income, £108; patron and impropriator, the Earl of Sefton. The church is a neat structure with a campanile tower, erected in 1746, and repaired in 1841. A school, built in 1840, is supported by subscription, aided by £8 per annum from the noble patron; and the interest of a few small bequests is appropriated to the poor. On the coast, near the mouth of the Alt, oak, ash, and fir trees are dug up, after ages of immersion in a subterranean forest at that place.

From: A Topographical Dictionary of England by Samuel Lewis (1848), pp. 44-49. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=50753 Date accessed: 25 June 2010.

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.

Online index of Lancashire Births, Marriages and Deaths Lancashire BMD

Lancashire Online Parish Clerks
An extremely useful resource for research in Lancashire Parishes http://www.lan-opc.org.uk/

Church records
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Census records
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http://www.1881pubs.com/ for details of public houses in the 1881 census

Probate records
Records of wills, administrations, inventories, indexes, etc. were filed by the court with jurisdiction over this parish. Go to Lancashire 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
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 * England Jurisdictions 1851
 * Vision of Britain

Web sites
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