St Martin by Looe, Cornwall Genealogy

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

Parish History
LOOE (THE), a river of Cornwall; rising on high grounds, near St. Clear; and running about 10 miles southward, past Liskeard and St. Keyne, to the head of Looe bay between East Looe and West Looe. It is joined, near its mouth, by the Trelawney river, which has a run of about 7½ miles south-south-eastward, and is sometimes called West Looe river. Looe bay is a mere incurvature, continuous with Whitesand bay on the E.John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales, 1870-72.

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 FreeBMD.

Church records
St Martin by Looe 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.

Census records
The 1851 Census of Religion was a separate census carried out at the same time as the main Census of Population. It assumed that everyone was Christian, and tried to find out what kind of Christians were most important in each district. It did this by counting how many people attended each church on the census Sunday. Our information has been considerably simplified from the original returns, which counted 35 different religious groups in England and Wales. One result is a large 'other' category.

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.

Websites
St Martin by Looe in GENUKI