Place:Fixby, West Riding of Yorkshire, England

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

source: Family History Library Catalog

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Fixby is a suburb in north-west Kirklees bordering neighbouring Calderdale and is traditionally part of Huddersfield in the English county of West Yorkshire. Fixby is mentioned in the Domesday Book. The name "Fixby" derives from the Gaelic Irish personal name Fiach.

In the nineteenth century Fixby was a large estate to which social reformer Richard Oastler was appointed as steward from 1830 until 1838 when he was relieved of his duties for his political activities: pamphleteering, lobbying and in the establishment of Short Time Committees in industrial towns throughout Yorkshire. The Short Time committees organised public meetings in order to raise petitions to improve conditions for children in the workplaces of the day and resulted in the Factory Act of 1847, with which Oastler was never fully satisfied.

Much of the historical Fixby Estate is now a golf course based at Fixby Hall, and intersected by the Kirklees Way footpath. Fixby Hall is a grade II listed building.

The area is now sought after suburban location of Huddersfield for homeowners. The village is just off the A6107 road and south of the M62 motorway.

The Huddersfield Crematorium is also situated in the area.

From 1894 until 1937 Fixby was part of Halifax Rural District. When the rural district was abolished, Fixby civil parish was split with the majority of the area going to Huddersfield Municipal Borough and the remainder split between Elland Urban District and Brighouse Municipal Borough. In 1974 Huddersfield was absorbed into the new Metropolitian Borough of Kirklees in West Yorkshire.

Historically, Fixby was in the ecclesiastical parish of Halifax in the Morley Division of the wapentake of Agbrigg and Morley.

Research Tips

• GENUKI on Fixby. The GENUKI page gives numerous references to local bodies providing genealogical assistance.
• The FamilySearch wiki on the ecclesiastical parish of Halifax provides a list of useful resources for the local area.
• A Vision of Britain through Time on Fixby.
• A Vision of Britain through Time also provides links to three maps for what is now South Yorkshire, produced by the United Kingdom Ordnance Survey, illustrating the boundaries between the civil parishes and the rural districts at various dates. These maps all blow up to a scale that will illustrate small villages and large farms or estates.

• Ordnance Survey West Riding 1888. The "Sanitary Districts (which preceded the rural districts) for the whole of the West Riding.
• Ordnance Survey West Riding South 1900. The rural and urban districts, not long after their introduction. (the southern part of Bradford, the southern part of Leeds, the southern part of Tadcaster Rural District, the southern part of Selby, Goole Rural District, and all the divisions of Halifax, Huddersfield, Wakefield, Doncaster, Barnsley, Rotherham and Sheffield)
• Ordnance Survey West Riding 1944. The urban and rural districts of the whole of the West Riding after the revisions of 1935.