Place:Alderwasley, Derbyshire, England

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

Alderwasley is a village and civil parish in the Amber Valley District of Derbyshire, England. The population of the civil parish as of the 2011 UK census was 469. The parish is about six miles north of Belper.

The village's name derives from the Old English for clearing near alluvial land growing with alders. In the Middle Ages, it was a manor within Duffield Frith and contained the Royal Park of Shining Cliff Woods. A later park was formed to the south called Bradley Laund. In 1284 the Shining Cliff was given to William Foun by Edmund Crouchback, Earl of Lancaster. Foun was given the job of maintaining the boundaries between the Pendleton and Peatpits Brooks.

This passed to Thomas Lowe by marriage in 1471. His son Anthony Lowe, as gentleman of the bedchamber for Henry VIII, was made a hereditary forester of Duffield Frith in 1523, and awarded the Manor of Alderwasley, with Ashleyhay, in 1528. In 1670 the whole estate passed, again by marriage, to Nicholas Hurt of Casterne Hall in Staffordshire, a direct ancestor or William Foun, and in 1715 he formed a new park. In 1905 this contained a herd of eighty fallow deer and what was considered to be the finest timber, especially oak, to be found. However the estate was sold and broken up in the 1920s.

The village has a reputation for its findings of silver treasure, namely coin clippings. The church plate of Alderwasley: a chalice, a paten, a flagon, and an alms dish were made from clippings of Charles I silver coins of total weight 8lb, dug up in Bacon Meadow on 27 March 1846, according to a label on an earthenware jar in which the clippings had been hidden.

end of Wikipedia contribution

Alderwasley was originally a chapelry in the ancient parish of Wirksworth in the Appletree Hundred of Derbyshire.

It was made a civil parish in 1866 and in 1894 it became part of the Belper Rural District. Since 1974 it has been in the Amber Valley District.

Research Tips

• Derbyshire Record Office website
• British History Online (Victoria County Histories) does not appear to cover Derbyshire geographically. A History of the County of Derby: Volume 2, edited by William Page is a part-volume covering the religious houses of the county. No further volumes have been found.
• GENUKI main page for Derbyshire which provides information on various topics covering the whole of the county, and also a link to a list of parishes. Under each parish there is a list of the settlements within it and brief description of each. This is a list of pre-1834 ancient or ecclesiastical parishes but there are suggestions as to how to find parishes set up since then. GENUKI provides references to other organizations who hold genealogical information for the local area. There is no guarantee that the website has been kept up to date and therefore the reader should check additional sources if possible.
• The FamilyTree Wiki has a series of pages similar to those provided by GENUKI which may have been prepared at a later date and from more recent data. The wiki has a link to English Jurisdictions 1851 which gives the registration district and wapentake for each parish, together with statistics from the 1851 census for the area.
• A Vision of Britain through Time, Derbyshire, section "Units and Statistics" leads to analyses of population and organization of the county from about 1800 through 1974. There are pages available for all civil parishes, municipal boroughs and other administrative divisions. Descriptions provided are usually based on a gazetteer of 1870-72 which often provides brief notes on the economic basis of the settlement and significant occurences through its history.
• For a more detailed view of a specific area try a map from the following selection. The oldest series are very clear at the third magnification offered. Comparing the map details with the GENUKI details for the same area is well worthwhile. Sections of the 1900 map showing parish boundaries only have been reproduced on some (but not all) parish pages here in WeRelate.

• Map of Derbyshire illustrating urban and rural districts in 1900 produced by UK Ordnance Survey and provided online by A Vision of Britain through Time. Parish boundaries and settlements within parishes are shown.
• Map of Derbyshire urban and rural districts in 1944 produced by UK Ordnance Survey and provided online by A Vision of Britain through Time. Parish boundaries and settlements within parishes are shown. This is not a repeat of the first map. There were some changes in urban and rural district structure in the 1930s.
• Ordnance Survey map of Derbyshire for 1967 This is the last in this series and was made while Derbyshire was experimenting with the non-metropolitan district structure adopted in 1974. It is a much cleaner map for reading the names of the civil parishes, but the smaller villages are no longer visible.

These are only three of the series of maps to be found in A Vision of Britain through Time.

• Wikimedia Commons map of the post-1974 districts of Derbyshire. The numbers will be linked to the districts on the WeRelate district pages.
• Wikimedia Commons often provides a map of the ancient divisions named "hundreds", but there does not appear to be one for Derbyshire. This 1832 Ordnance Survey map from A Vision of Britain through Time is not as good as those in the Wikimedia Commons series.
• Derbyshire family history societies are listed in GENUKI.
• Towns and Villages of Derbyshire and the Peak District is a locally produced website designed for tourists.