EVANS Family help

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kiwibarb
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Last seen: 8 weeks 1 day ago
Joined: Saturday, 31-03-2018

I have some of my Evans family born in the Superintendent Registrars District of OSWESTRY, the Registrar's District, ST MARTINS  in the counties of SALOP & DENBIGSHIRE.

Could someone please tell me just where I should be searching for information?  Oswestry or Denbigshire??

Not familiar with this area so struggling to find information.

Many thanks for any help.

Regards

Kiwibarb

Michael J Hulme
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Last seen: 2 hours 9 min ago
Joined: Saturday, 4-06-2011

Hello Kiwibarb

To start to try to understand your problem you have to go back to the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act which compelled parishes to unite into groupings called 'Unions'.  These groupings did not necessarily take any account of county boundaries but presumably used the local geography to decide who was going to combine with who so they ended up with a situation where a Union could include parishes from more than one county which is probably what happened in the area you are researching.

Move forward a few years to the introduction of Civil Registration which came into effect on 1st July 1837 and it was decided to use the existing Poor Law Union boundaries as the basis for the new Civil Registration boundaries.  This is how we ended up with such strange registration areas.

Having said all this I feel sure that as your relatives were in the Registrars District of St Martins you need to be looking (mainly / mostly?) in Shropshire unless there was some quirk that included a parish or two from Denbighshire in the St Martins District.

There is some useful information on the GENUKI web site and especially the Oswestry Registration District page where you can see which parishes that made up the Registration District were in Shropshire and which were in Denbighshire.

If you still can't find your people tell us their names and dates of birth and perhaps someone can help to find them.

Mike