Place:Bowling, West Riding of Yorkshire, England

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

source: Family History Library Catalog

Bowling was a village absorbed into the City of Bradford in 1882.

A Vision of Britain through Time provides the following description of Deighton from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1870-72:

"BOWLING, a village, a township, two chapelries, and a subdistrict, in the parish and district of Bradford, [West Riding of] Yorkshire. The village stands adjacent to the Bradford and Halifax railway, 1½ mile SSW of Bradford, and has a station on the railway. The Bowling Iron-Works, which furnished many supplies to Government during the war in the Crimea, are adjacent. The township includes also the village of Dudley-Hill. Acres, 1,545. Real property, £36,691; of which £250 are in mines, and £5,300 in iron-works. Pop. in 1841, 8,918; in 1861, 14,494. Houses, 3,160. The property is divided among a few. Bowling Hall is the seat of the Sturge family; and was the head-quarters of the Earl of Newcastle, in 1642, on occasion of his victory over Fairfax on Adwalton-Moor. The inhabitants are employed variously in the iron-works, in the cloth trade, in stone quarries, and in coal and iron mines. The chapelries are Bowling-St. John, constituted in 1843, and Bowling-St. Stephen, constituted in 1860. Pop., 3,488 and 1,297. The living of St. J. is a vicarage, that of St. S. a p. curacy in the dio. of Ripon. Value of St. John, £175;* of St. Stephen, £120.* Patron of St. J., the Vicar of Bradford; of St. S.,Hardy, Esq. The church of St. J. is good; and that of St. S. was built in 1861, and is in the early decorated style, with tower and spire. An Independent chapel, in the Romanesque style, was built in 1865; and there are other dissenting chapels.--The subdistrict is conterminate with the township."

Historically, Bowling was in the ecclesiastical parish of Bradford in the Morley division of the wapentake of Agbrigg and Morley.

Research Tips

• GENUKI on Bowling. The GENUKI page gives numerous references to local bodies providing genealogical assistance.
• The FamilySearch wiki on the ecclesiastical parish of Bradford provides a list of useful resources for the local area.
• A Vision of Britain through Time on Bowling.
• A Vision of Britain through Time provides links to maps of the West Riding, produced by the United Kingdom Ordnance Survey, illustrating the boundaries between the civil parishes and the rural districts at various dates. The location of individual settlements within the parishes is also shown. These maps all expand to a very large scale.

• Ordnance Survey West Riding 1888. The "Sanitary Districts (which preceded the rural districts) for the whole of the West Riding.
• Ordnance Survey West Riding North 1900 and Ordnance Survey West Riding South 1900. The rural and urban districts, not long after their introduction. NOTE: In 2022 the map of the southern section is not available through the Vision of Britain website. It is unknown if this omission is accidental or if the copy used by the university has been damaged in some way.
• Yorkshire West Riding South and Yorkshire West Riding North revised_1944. These two maps illustrate the urban and rural districts of the whole of the West Riding after the revisions of 1935.
• A further useful map on A Vision of Britain through Time is a boundary map dated 1917. This shows all the boundaries of villages, townships and parishes in the Holmfirth area.