On 2011/09/19 23:30, B Robertson wrote: > Am confused about London districts.Someone says Poplar, mine are in East > Smithfield. Some BMDs are in St. Botolph without Aldgate? Search Tower > Hamlets says another. I know my great-great grandfather Robert Hensher > married in St. Annes Limehouse in1835. Please help someone. What dates are > areas used and is there a map which will sort me out!!! I'm not surprised that people unused to the geography of East London become very confused over where various names are in relation to each other. Unfortunately, nowhere is very far from anywhere else in the East End. The original City of London only occupied a square mile. Poplar and the Isle of Dogs are synonymous. As are Wapping and Limehouse. A lot of the confusion comes from the use of parish names as places of birth. You see this a lot in the 1841 census. Tower Hamlets is, as the name should suggest, the collection of (original) hamlets outside of the Tower of London. Primarily, this covers the modern areas of Hackney, Shoreditch, Poplar, Stepney and Bethnal Green. Multiple parishes! I make use of Google and Wikipedia to query the names of various churches (your St Annes in Limehouse for example) and from the information returned, am generally able to locate the extant churches on maps. Even when the church no longer exists, it is usually possible to work out where it was. -- Regards, Mike Fry Johannesburg