Helmsley, Yorkshire Genealogy

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

Parish History
Helmsley All Saints (with Sproxton, Rievaulx and Carlton) is an Ancient Parish and a market town in the county of Yorkshire. Pockley and Harome, Yorkshire are chapelries of this parish.

Other places in the parish include: Beadlam, Bedlam, Carlton, Carlton near Helmsley, Sproxton, Raisdale, Rievaulx, Rivaulx, Rockley, and Laskill Pasture.

The Church of All Saints dates from 1866-1869 to replace the earlier church of St Matthew and has been designated as a grade II* listed building.

The Church of St Mary Magdalene Helmsley dates from 1882 and has been designated as a grade II* listed building British listed building

See also Helmsley Wikipedia

HELMSLEY (St. Matthew), a market-town and parish, and the head of a union, in the wapentake of Ryedale, N. riding of York; comprising the townships of Beadlam, Laskill-Pasture, Rivaulx, and Sproxton, and the chapelries of Bilsdale-Midcable, Haram, and Pockley; and containing 3475 inhabitants, of whom 1465 are in the town, 23 miles (N.) from York, and 218 (N. by W.) from London.

Civil Registration
Records from the Ryedale 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
Helmsley 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
Helmsley 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