Balsall Heath St Thomas in the Moors, Worcestershire Genealogy

Guide to Balsall Heath St Thomas in the Moors, Worcestershire ancestry, family history, and genealogy: parish registers, transcripts, census records, birth records, marriage records, and death records.

Chapelry History
BALSALL HEATH, a chapelry in King's Norton parish, Worcester; on the Birmingham and Gloucester railway, 2½ miles S of Birmingham. It was constituted in 1853; and it has a post office under Birmingham. The church is ancient.

Additional information:

Balsall Heath was agricultural land between Moseley village and the city of Birmingham until the 1850s when expansion along Moseley Road joined the two. The area was originally part of the Worcestershire parish of King's Norton, and was added to the county borough of Birmingham in Warwickshire on October 1, 1891.

Balsall Heath initially had a reasonably affluent population, which can still be seen in the dilapidated grandeur of some of the larger houses. A railway station on Brighton Road (on the Birmingham to Bristol line) led to further expansion, and the end of the 19th century saw a proliferation of high-density small terraced houses.

A Muslim community was started in June 1940 when two Yemenis purchased an artisan cottage on Mary Street. They went on to establish the first mosque in the city. [1] Today, Balsall Heath has one of the largest Muslim communities in Birmingham. It is also home to diverse communities from across the Commonwealth.

By the 1980s, many of Balsall Heath's houses were in a dilapidated condition, some were still without bathrooms or indoor toilets. The local authority considered demolishing these properties but chose to refurbish them as part of an Urban Renewal scheme.

In July 2005 Balsall Heath was hit by a tornado, which devastated many buildings around Church Road and Ladypool Road. Birmingham City Council offered loans to those who were unable to repair their properties, and the area has now made a full recovery.

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
Balsall Heath St Thomas in the Moors 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 The Hive (where the Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service is located).

Probate records
Records of wills, administrations, inventories, indexes, etc. were filed by the court with jurisdiction over this parish. Go to Worcestershire 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
Worcester Branch of the Birmingham and Midland Society for Genealogy and HeraldryAdd any relevant sites that aren’t mentioned above.