For Census information go HERE and for Cemetery records go HERE.

The Kingswear ferries are treated as a separate subject since there have been ferries between Kingswear and Dartmouth continuously since at least 1365. See this article: Link.

What’s in a Name? – See Below

Pre-Historic era	Link
Romans to the Normans	Link
Late Medieval	Link
16th and 17th Century	Link
18th Century	Link
19th Century	Link
20th Century	Link
World War I 1914 – 1918	Link
World War II 1939 – 1945	Link
Notable People	Link
Notable Buildings	Link
Genealogy	Link

Past scholars of our local history have concluded, following a most unscholarly line and erroneous deduction, that ‘Kingswear’ derives from an estate belonging to a Saxon king and that the name reflected the one-time presence of a fish trap or weir.

For our peninsula, no document survives which is older than Domesday – 1086. Kingswear is not mentioned in Domesday, nor is Kingston which has a 12th century derivation that has nothing to do with royalty. Background knowledge of Anglo-Saxon England leads us to expect that there was an anti-Viking military road maintained by royal decree, following the South coast of Wessex. A boat would be available to carry royal messengers and other travellers across the Dart estuary. 12th & 13th century place names (Nethway, Boohay) support the existence of this hypothetical road continuing into post-conquest times as a local route of some importance.

An ‘inn’ and a few other buildings would be built by locals near the landing place. Such a community would be within one of the manors listed in Domesday. During the 12th century, church- trained clerks, not necessarily local men, tried to spell and make sense of the names they heard people use for their homesteads. There are no silent letters in Old English. So the settlement which was pronounced in Devon as ‘kingas waya(r)’ – beside the king’s way – was written by the first clerks as Kingesweir. Thereafter ‘it is written’ and so copied and the origin forgotten – except by the inhabitants. But who in medieval society would listen to illiterate peasants?

The same settlement was also known as early as the 12th century to folks who lived elsewhere as ‘Kitte Torre’. Now kites are graceful on the wing but have unpleasant scavenging habits on the ground and use old rags, if they can find them, in their nests. The folk of the Kinges’ Waye would hardly admit to living in a kite’s nest! But this looks like the first reference to Kittery.

Pre-Roman

Pre-Medieval

15th and 16th Centuries

18th Century

19th Century

20th Century