Family History in Lancashire

From the mid-eighteenth century people started to migrate into Lancashire as the industrial revolution accelerated, so much so that in 1851 almost a quarter of the population of Lancashire had been born outside the county. This trend was reversed during the twentieth century as people migrated to the, now, more affluent south of England. The net result is that a great many people throughout the British Isles and abroad have an ancestral investment in Lancashire.

Lancashire was not, as many people imagine, comprised of endless ‘Coronation Streets’. While the conurbations of Liverpool and Manchester and the cotton towns had their share of terraced housing, the old county was mostly rural in nature, extending from the river Mersey in the south to the Lake District (including Coniston Water, the Old Man of Coniston and most of Lake Windermere) in the north and from the Pennine hills in the east to the Irish Sea in the west.

The ancient county of Lancashire was emasculated by the boundary changes of 1974. The creation of the new counties of Cumbria, Greater Manchester and Merseyside and the transfer of the Warrington area to Cheshire resulted in the transfer of documents from the Lancashire Record Office at Preston to the record offices at Barrow in Furness, Chester, Kendal, Liverpool and Manchester, albeit the Lancashire RO has filmed copies of many of them. However, not all the records relevant to the new counties were moved, some classes such as quarter sessions and probate records remain at Preston; it is therefore important to appreciate that for research into your family, even if they stayed in one place, you may have to visit a number of record offices for the documents that you need.

Discover how our Lancashire ancestors lived

Lancashire's Archives

Lancashire's Family History Societies

Family History Press