Wakefield St John, Yorkshire Genealogy

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

Parish History
WAKEFIELD (All Saints), a borough, market town, and parish, and the head of a union, in the Lower division of the wapentake of Agbrigg, W. riding of York; containing, with the townships of Alverthorpe with Thornes, and Stanley with Wrenthorpe, and the chapelry of Horbury, 29,992 inhabitants, of whom 14,754 are in the town, 30 miles (S. W. by W.) from York, and 184 (N. N. W.) from London. The district church dedicated to St. John, erected under a special act of parliament, at an expense of £10,000, in 1795, is finely situated in a spacious cemetery. Holy Trinity church was built at an expense of £4000, wholly by subscription. Two districts, named respectively St. Andrew's and St. Mary's, were endowed in 1844 by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners.

Wakefield St John is an Ecclesiastical Parish in the county of Yorkshire, created in 1816 from Wakefield [All Saints] Ancient Parish. Wakefield St John Parish Records begin 1795 Bishops Transcripts 1796 The following non-Church of England denominations were located somewhere in Wakefield, but the exact parish has not been identified: Baptist, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Independent/Congregational, Methodist New Connexion, Presbyterian Unitarian, Primitive Methodist, Roman Catholic, Society of Friends/Quaker, Wesleyan Methodist, and Wesleyan Methodist Reform.

Civil Registration
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.

Church Records
Online data content from chapelry registers of Wakefield St. John exists at some of the following websites and for the specified ranges of years:

For a full list of all those chapels surrounding Chapelry and comprising the whole ancient parish of Wakefield St. John to which it was attached, be certain to see "Church Records" on the Wakefield St. John page.

Online data content from chapelry registers of Wakefield St. John exists at some of the following websites and for the specified ranges of years:

Wakefield is an 'ancient' parish (created before 1813). Church of England records of Wakefield survive from as early as 1613 (All Saints), 1795 (St. John), 1843 (Holy Trinity), 1845 (St. Andrew), 1845 (St. Mary), 1862 (St Michael), and 1897 (St. Mark). In addition, the following pre-1837 Church of England chapelries were also found within Wakefield parish:


 * St. Peter's and St. Leonard's Horbury (1598)
 * St. Peter's Stanley (1824)
 * St. Paul's Alverthorpe (1825)
 * St. James' Thornes (1831)

The original registers are deposited at the West Yorkshire Archives in Wakefield.

The copies made by the minister (ordered by an Act of 1598) and sent each year to the Bishop of the diocese (known as parish register transcripts or Bishop's transcripts) survive from 1600 and are deposited at the West Yorkshire Archives branch in Sheepscar, Leeds.

The Family History Library in Salt Lake City has both parish registers and bishop's transcripts on microfilm for Wakefield and its chapelries, which are listed in the. Many of these records are indexed in the International Genealogical Indexavailable online through familysearch.org.

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

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

Websites
Contributor: add any relevant sites that aren’t mentioned above.