Leicester All Saints, Leicestershire Genealogy

Guide to Leicester All Saints, Leicestershire ancestry, family history, and genealogy: parish registers, transcripts, census records, birth records, marriage records, and death records.

Parish History
LEICESTER, a borough and market-town, having separate jurisdiction, and the head of a union, in the S. division of the county of Leicester, of which it is the chief town, 97 miles (N.N. W.) from London. The old borough, consisted of the parishes of All Saints, St. Leonard,St. Martin, and St. Nicholas, and part of the parishes of St.Margaret and St. Mary.

All Saints Church, Leicester, is a redundant Anglican church in High Cross Street, Leicester, England. It has been designated by English Heritage as a Grade I listed building, and is under the care of the Churches Conservation Trust.

In the Domesday Book it is recorded that Leicester had six churches, and it is assumed that All Saints was one of these. In 1143 it was given to Leicester Abbey The church was enlarged in about 1300 when aisles were added. During the following century the tower and the nave were raised and new aisle roofs were built. The church was used for secular as well as sacred purposes. In 1418 Margery Kempe was tried for Lollardy (for being a follower of John Wycliffe) in the church. In 1583, during outbreaks of the plague, the assizes were held in the church. Later the local population and businesses in the city moved elsewhere in the city, and All Saints parish combined with other local parishes.

In the early 19th century the fabric of the church was deteriorating, and in 1829 the chancel was demolished and rebuilt. The local architect Henry Goddard added new seating and extended the gallery in 1843, and in 1855–56 he restored the roofs. In 1874–76 Joseph Goddard and Alfred Paget undertook a restoration involving the addition of new windows, building a new nave roof, and removing the gallery. The tower was restored by William Basset-Smith in 1894–95. A new road system was built in the city in the 1960s which isolated the church. The chancel was divided from the rest of the church to form a meeting room, but numbers attending the church continued to decline. It closed in 1982 and was then used as a store. The church was declared redundant on 1 January 1983, and was vested in the Churches Conservation Trust on 8 July 1986.

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
Leicester 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 Leicestershire Record Office.

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