Family Historian User Group

For a useful set of maps showing England and Wales jurisdictions as at 1851 * see http://maps.familysearch.org/

Click on a county, then choose List all parishes in <county>.
Zoom to see a map displaying parish boundaries within the county.
Then click the Layers tab above the list on the left.
You can now opt to show extra layers for Civil Registration District, Diocese, Rural Deanery, Poor Law Union, Hundred, Province, Division.

If you take the example from the 1841 census shown in the first post in this thread and display the Registration districts it illustrates that Middleton parish and Tamworth parish were both in Warwickshire but the Tamworth Registration district straddled the border between Staffordshire and Warwickshire. And although Middleton was in the Fazeley registration sub-district, Fazeley parish was in Staffordshire!

(To complete the picture, according to Wikipedia the town of Tamworth was historically divided between Staffordshire and Warwickshire, with the county boundary running through the town centre. The boundary was re-drawn in 1888, with the town placed entirely in Staffordshire.)

* Edit: Not sure about that 1851 date. The page on Familysearch is headed England & Wales Jurisdictions 1851 but in Hampshire it includes the parish of Denmead which didn't come into being until 1880!

AdrianBruce wrote:Peter - so you're the UK genealogist who uses "Great Britain" and "United Kingdom" as a country!

Yup. I use England, Scotland, and Ireland up to 1706, Ireland and Great Britain from 1707 to 1800, and United Kingdom from 1801 (with Ireland separate again from 1922, of course).

Originally I too just listed the four home nations separately regardless of the date. If you are *only* dealing with the 'British" Isles, it don't think it really matters (in fact, it can help). However, my tree eventually branched out to places where changes in national jurisdiction were rather more important. The most crucial thing of all, I think, is internal consistency within your own system. So, once I started being more pendantically accurate with places further afield, I felt I really had to be so with places closer to home too.

It can grate sometimes though. Seeing my 1916-born grandfather's birthplace listed as Co. Kilkenny, UK (rather than Ireland) does not sit easy with me, and there are some family members who would not take kindly to it at all. However it is a matter of historical fact, however your opinion on it might be coloured by modern political reality.