Birstall, Yorkshire Genealogy

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

Parish History
BIRSTAL (St. Peter), a parish, partly in the union of Bradford, and partly in that of Dewsbury, wapentake of Morley, W. riding of York, 7 miles (S. W.) from Leeds, on the road to Huddersfield; containing 29,723 inhabitants. This parish comprises...about 13,000 acres, and includes the chapelries of Cleckheaton, Drighlington, Liversedge, and Tong, and the townships of Gomersal, Heckmondwike, Hunsworth, and Wyke.There are places of worship for Wesleyans, Independents, Moravians, and Methodists of the New Connexion.

This was a large boundaried parish with several chapelries, each with their own parish (chapel) registers of christenings, burials and occasional marriages. Check the Familysearch.org/search/catalog to find digitized copies of these registers. For convenience,see the links to online indexes and to images of the original church registers listed below under "Church Records".

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.

List of Chapelry's in this Parish

 * Birkenshaw cum Hunsworth
 * Cleckheaton
 * Drighlington
 * Gomersal
 * Heckmondwike

To find the names of the neighbouring 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.

Birstall is an ancient parish (created before 1813). The Church of England records for Birstall St. Peter's survive from 1558. The following is a list of other pre-1837 Church of England churches within the parish of Birstall, with the dates of their earliest records:


 * St. James Tong (1550)
 * Whitechapel Cleckheaton (1761)
 * St. Paul's Drighlington (1816)
 * Christ Church Liversedge (1816)
 * St. James Heckmondwike (1831)
 * St. Paul's Birkenshaw (1832)
 * St. John's Cleckheaton (1832)

The original registers are deposited at the West Yorkshire Archives in Wakefield. Microfilm/fiche copies are available at archive branches such as Leeds at Sheepscar and Kirklees in Huddersfield.

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 Birstall and its chapelries, which are listed in the. Many of these records are indexed in the International Genealogical Index available online through the 'Advanced Search' at familysearch.org.

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