Thornton Watlass, Yorkshire Genealogy

Guide to Thornton Watlass, Yorkshire ancestry, family history, and genealogy: parish registers, transcripts, census records, birth records, marriage records, and death records.

Parish History
Thornton Watlass St Mary is an Ancient parish in North Yorkshire. Other places in the parish include: Clifton upon Ure, Thirn, Rookwith, and Clifton upon Yore.

THORNTON-WATLASS (St. Mary),a parish, in the union of Bedale, wapentake of Hang-East, N.riding of York; containing, with the townships of Clifton-upon-Ure, Rookwith, and Thirn, 471 inhabitants, of whom 203 are in the township of Thornton Watlass, 2¾ miles (S. W.) from Bedale.

Civil Registration
Records from the Northallerton registration district held at the North Yorkshire Registration Service are included in the online index available at Yorkshire BMD for post 1837 events; view the coverage table to check progress on the availability of index search.

Marriages include


 * Church of England marriages.
 * Civil Marriages at register offices, or non-conformist churches where a registrar was required to be present at the ceremony.
 * Authorised Person marriages. These cover the non-conformist places of worship which applied to keep their own registers as a result of the Marriage Act, 1898 (bringing them into line with Jewish and Quaker marriages which had this status since 1837). In such cases an 'Authorised Person' (usually the minister or priest) recorded the ceremony instead of the registrar. Earlier weddings in these places would be included with civil marriage registers.

A secondary index of Birth, marriages and deaths were kept by the government, from July 1837 to the present day. The civil registration article tells more about these records. There are several Internet sites with name lists or indexes. A popular site is FreeBMD however this secondary index may omit the event and may not contain the detail of the Yorkshire BMD index

Church Records
Thornton Watlass parish registers of christenings, marriages and burials are available online for the following years:

To find the names of the neighboring parishes, use England Jurisdictions 1851 Map. In this site, search for the name of the parish, click on the location "pin", click Options and click List contiguous parishes.

Records are also available at the North Yorkshire County Record Office.

Poor Law Unions
Bedale Poor Law Union, Yorkshire

Probate records
Records of wills, administrations, inventories, indexes, etc. were filed by the court with jurisdiction over this parish. Go to Yorkshire Probate Records to find the name of the court having primary jurisdiction. Scroll down in the article to the section Court Jurisdictions by Parish.

Maps and Gazetteers
Maps are a visual look at the locations in England. Gazetteers contain brief summaries about a place.


 * England Jurisdictions 1851
 * Vision of Britain