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- the text in this article is based on one in Wikipedia
Bradford is a district of east Manchester within the county of Greater Manchester, England, two miles northeast of Manchester city centre. The population at the 2011 UK census was 15,784. Before 1974 Bradford was in the county of Lancashire.
After the closure of its heavy industries Bradford was for many years an economically deprived area, but has undergone regeneration with the building of the City of Manchester Stadium which hosted the 2002 Commonwealth Games. The stadium is now home to Manchester City Football Club. Bradford is neighboured by Beswick to the south and the two areas are sometimes referred to as "Bradford-with-Beswick". The River Medlock and the Ashton Canal run through Bradford.
The name of the area is ancient and in 1196 the village was recorded as "Bradeford", meaning 'the broad ford'. Up to the Industrial Revolution, it was rural with woodland, pastures and brooks. Wolves and eagles once inhabited the woodlands and honey production was part of the local economy.
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Governance
Bradford was originally a part of the Salford Hundred in the County Palatine of Lancashire. Bradford was an independent township of the ancient parish of Manchester, having its own parochial offices under the Manchester churchwardens. In 1841 this changed and the township became a member of the Manchester Poor Law Union, which was established under the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1841. In 1896 it was joined with other Manchester northern suburbs to form the short-lived civil parish of North Manchester. North Manchester (not included in the WeRelate database) was abolished in 1916 when all the suburbs within it were absorbed into the County Borough of Manchester.
Industries
Coal mining
From Tudor times (1485–1603), sufficient coal was mined in Bradford to supply most of the needs of Manchester. With the onset of the Industrial Revolution (circa 1750), Bradford Colliery provided fuel to power steam engines in the new cotton mills that were springing up in the district. When the Ashton Canal was built in 1797, a private branch was connected to the colliery.
In 1871, the owner of Bradford Colliery was R. T. Parker and the occupier, for rate purposes, was T. & C. Livesey. When deeper pit shafts were sunk, seams of fireclay were discovered. Consequently a brickworks was built on the north side of the colliery site to manufacture firebricks for use in lining furnaces.
In 1896, the pit manager was F. L. Ward and the under-manager was George Bentley. At that time there were 404 underground workers and 125 surface workers. Coal was mined for making gas, for household and manufacturing use and for raising steam. The brickworks was operational and owned by Edward Williams. It employed three underground workers extracting clay and two surface workers. In 1935 Bradford Colliery became part of Manchester Collieries and part of the National Coal Board on nationalisation in 1947. It closed in September 1968, not because its supply of coal was exhausted, but because subsidence was threatened to built-up areas were there to be further exploitation of new coal seams.
Coal from the mine was fed to the nearby Stuart Street Power Station via an underground conveyor system.
Other industries
The other large employer in Bradford was Richard Johnson & Nephew (Bradford Ironworks), manufacturers of wire of all kinds. The ironworks was close to the Ashton Canal. In 1869, a gasometer was built at the new Bradford Gasworks. This, along with the adjacent colliery, ironworks and cotton mills, was a dominant feature of the landscape.
Research tips
- See the Wikipedia articles on parishes and civil parishes for descriptions of this lowest rung of local administration. The original parishes were ecclesiastical (described as ancient parishes), under the jurisdiction of the local priest. A parish covered a specific geographical area and was sometimes equivalent to that of a manor. Sometimes, in the case of very large rural parishes, there were chapelries where a "chapel of ease" allowed parishioners to worship closer to their homes. In the 19th century the term civil parish was adopted to define parishes with a secular form of local government. In WeRelate both civil and ecclesiastical parishes are included in the type of place called a "parish". Smaller places within parishes, such as chapelries and hamlets, have been redirected into the parish in which they are located. The names of these smaller places are italicized within the text.
- An urban district was a type of municipality in existence between 1894 and 1974. They were formed as a middle layer of administration between the county and the civil parish and were used for urban areas usually with populations of under 30,000. Inspecting the archives of a urban district will not be of much help to the genealogist or family historian, unless there is need to study land records in depth.
- Civil registration or vital statistics and census records will be found within registration districts. To ascertain the registration district to which a parish belongs, see Registration Districts in Lancashire, part of the UK_BMD website.
- The terms municipal borough and county borough were adopted in 1835 replacing the historic "boroughs". Municipal boroughs generally had populations between 30,000 and 50,000; while county boroughs usually had populations of over 50,000. County boroughs had local governments independent of the county in which they were located, but municipal boroughs worked in tandem with the county administration. Wikipedia explains these terms in much greater detail.
- Lancashire Online Parish Clerks provide free online information from the various parishes, along with other data of value to family and local historians conducting research in the County of Lancashire.
- FamilySearch Lancashire Research Wiki provides a good overview of the county and also articles on most of the individual parishes (very small or short-lived ones may have been missed).
- Ancestry (international subscription necessary) has a number of county-wide collections of Church of England baptisms, marriages and burials, some from the 1500s, and some providing microfilm copies of the manuscript entries. There are specific collections for Liverpool (including Catholic baptisms and marriages) and for Manchester. Their databases now include electoral registers 1832-1935. Another pay site is FindMyPast.
- A map of Lancashire circa 1888 supplied by A Vision of Britain through Time includes the boundaries between the parishes and shows the hamlets within them.
- A map of Lancashire circa 1954 supplied by A Vision of Britain through Time is a similar map for a later timeframe.
- GENUKI provides a website covering many sources of genealogical information for Lancashire. The organization is gradually updating the website and the volunteer organizers may not have yet picked up all the changes that have come with improving technology.
- The Victoria County History for Lancashire, provided by British History Online, covers the whole of the county in six volumes (the seventh available volume [numbered Vol 2] covers religious institutions). The county is separated into its original hundreds and the volumes were first published between 1907 and 1914. Most parishes within each hundred are covered in detail. Maps within the text can contain historical information not available elsewhere.
- A description of the township of Bradford (Manchester) from British History Online (Victoria County Histories), published 1911
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