Tithe Project
Last updated: 25/01/2013
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Tithe Digitisation
Cornwall Record Office (CRO) holds around 200 parish 
and town
tithe maps and the accompanying survey books (apportionments),
dating from c1840. These documents provide a fascinating snap-shot
of land use and ownership in the 19th century and can be useful for
local, industrial, property and family history studies. The maps
include boundaries of fields, woods, roads and rivers and locations
of buildings. They follow old parish boundaries and are usually
large scale. The apportionments give details of who owned and
occupied land or properties, and what the land was used for.
Frequent use of the already fragile maps has taken its toll on
the collection and some are now unfit for use due to their poor
condition, and access to all is restricted to on-site visits to the
CRO. In order to preserve the documents and improve access to them,
we have undertaken a project to digitise the maps and survey books
in conjunction with parish, town and district councils.
Eventually, we plan to make the images and accompanying
databases of information available on-line. In the meantime, they
are available as CDROM packages for purchase or use at the Record
Office or Cornish Studies Library.
CDROM Tithe Package
CDROM packages containing maps and apportionments are available
for many parishes at a cost of £20 per package plus £5 postage and
packaging. A discount of £5 is available for residents of certain
parishes. Please see the link below for the list
of parishes available.
Parishes
available for purchase on CDROM
The CDROM are compatible with PCs running all versions of
Microsoft Windows, but are not available for Apple Macintosh. To
order a CDROM package please use the Tithe CDROM
Order Form. If you would like to pay by debit or credit card
please use the Credit/Debit
Card Mandate Form.
Volunteer Transcription Project
The Tithe Apportionments provide the link between the landscape
and people and are interesting sources whether viewed in
conjunction with the map or on their own. The main challenge in
using them is that they are arranged by landowner rather than plot
number so tracing the information about a plot can be a
time-consuming activity.
To overcome these barriers we ran a volunteer project to extract
the data from the apportionments to make it available in a
searchable format. Individuals and volunteers from Cornwall On-line
Parish Clerks and Cornwall Family History Society transcribed
the digital survey books when they became available through the
wider tithe project. When the data has been checked this will also
be available on-line.