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; links to online indexes to the original church registers are 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.

Church records
Birstall 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 West Yorkshire Archive Service.

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