Where did our ancestors live?

Ask someone where they come from, or where they were born, and they could give you a number of different answers, each one of them equally true. I, for example, could say that I was born in the UK, or more specifically that I was born in Scotland. I could be even more exact and tell you that I was born in Edinburgh or if I wanted to give you a very precise answer, I could say that I was born in the Elsie Inglis Memorial Maternity Hospital, in Abbeyhill, Edinburgh – I have to confess that I don’t know the name of the ward…

The same issues would have affected our ancestors and we have to bear this in mind when we’re attempting to make sense of the information that they left behind in documents such as census returns and military service records.

Their lives were governed by a variety of institutions, each of which had its own internal hierarchy of administrative units. For family history research purposes, the most important of these are the Church of England’s provinces, dioceses, archdeaconries and ecclesiastical parishes along with