Place:Marldon, Devon, England

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia Marldon (#14 on map) is a village in the South Hams District in Devon, England, to the northwest of Paignton. It is the most northeasterly civil parish in the South Hams and includes the village of Compton and Compton Castle. Beacon Hill transmitting station is on the highest point in the parish. Church records date back to 1598. The parish was originally a chapelry in the parish of Paignton in the Haytor Hundred. Marldon was a small village until the 1960s when major residential development took place. The population according to the UK census of 2011 was 2,123. A Vision of Britain through Time provides the following description of Marldon from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1871-72: "MARLDON, a parish in Totnes [registration] district, Devon; near Torbay, 2½ miles W of Torquay [railway] station, and 5 ENE of Totnes. It contains the hamlets of Compton and Westerland; and its Post town is Totnes. Acres: 2,327. Real property: £4,326. Population: 554. Houses: 117. "The property is divided among a few. The manor belonged, in the time of Edward the Confessor, to Osolf; was held, at Domesday, by Stephen, and then bore the name of Contime; passed, in the time of Henry II., to Maurice de Pole, ancestor of Sir William Pole, the antiquary; took from the Poles the name of Compton-Pole; passed from them to the Comptons; belonged, in the time of Edward II., to the family of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the navigator; went from them to the family of Bishop; passed, about 1830, to the Garratts; and belongs now to the Rev. J. Bewes. The manorial mansion is called Compton Castle; has a very ancient gateway, and a N embattled tower; and includes a chapel, with beautiful windows. The living is a vicarage, annexed to the vicarage of Paignton, in the diocese of Exeter. The church is old but good; the chancel was recently restored; and the church contains monuments of the De Poles, the Bishops, and others. There is a recently erected national school."

Research Tips

(revised Jul 2021)

• Ordnance Survey Map of Devonshire North and Devonshire South are large-scale maps covering the whole of Devon between them. They show the parish boundaries when Rural Districts were still in existence and before the mergers of parishes that took place in 1935 and 1974. When expanded the maps can show many of the small villages and hamlets inside the parishes. These maps are now downloadable for personal use but they can take up a lot of computer memory.
• GENUKI has a selection of maps showing the boundaries of parishes in the 19th century. The contribution from "Know Your Place" on Devon is a huge website yet to be discovered in detail by this contributor.

• Devon has three repositories for hands-on investigation of county records. Each has a website which holds their catalog of registers and other documents.

• the Devon Heritage Centre at Exeter
• the Northern Record Office at Barnstaple
• the Plymouth and West Devon Record Office at Plymouth which is independent of the other two.

• There is, however, a proviso regarding early records for Devon. Exeter was badly hit in a "blitz" during World War II and the City Library, which then held the county archives, was burnt out. About a million books and historic documents went up in smoke. While equivalent records--particularly wills--are quite easy to come by for other English counties, some records for Devon and surrounding counties do not exist.

• Devon Family History Society Mailing address: PO Box 9, Exeter, EX2 6YP, United Kingdom. The society has branches in various parts of the county. It is the largest Family History Society in the United Kingdom. The website has a handy guide to each of the parishes in the county and publishes the registers for each of the Devon dioceses on CDs.

• This is the home page to the GENUKI Devon website. It has been updated since 2015 and includes a lot of useful information on each parish.
• Devon has a Online Parish Clerk (OPC) Project which can be reached through GENUKI. Only about half of the parishes have a volunteer contributing local data. For more information, consult the website, especially the list at the bottom of the homepage.

• The FamilySearch Wiki provides a similar information service to GENUKI. An index of parishes leads to notes and references for each parish.

• Brett Langston's list of Devon Registration Districts and parishes within each registration district from 1837 to the present can indicate where to find details of civil registration entries since the process began in England.

• Magna Britannia, Volume 6 by Daniel Lysons and Samuel Lysons. A general and parochial history of the county. Originally published by T Cadell and W Davies, London, 1822, and placed online by British History Online. This is a volume of more than 500 pages of the history of Devon, parish by parish. It is 100 years older than the Victoria County Histories available for some other counties, but equally thorough in its coverage. Contains information that may have been swept under the carpet in more modern works.

• There is a cornucopia of county resources at Devon Heritage. Topics are: Architecture, Census, Devon County, the Devonshire Regiment, Directory Listings, Education, Genealogy, History, Industry, Parish Records, People, Places, Transportation, War Memorials. There are fascinating resources you would never guess that existed from those topic titles. (NOTE: There may be problems reaching this site. One popular browser provider has put a block on it. This may be temporary, or it may be its similarity in name to the Devon Heritage Centre at Exeter.)
• South Hams, Devon, A Genealogical Information Resource A collection of transcriptions of church registers and the 1841 census, plus a free lookup service in registers and other materials that have not been transcribed, for the South Hams District of Devon, England. The website states that its latest transcription was added 10 Nov 2018.