Place:Hartshead, 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

Hartshead is a village in Kirklees, West Yorkshire, England, west of Dewsbury and near to Hartshead Moor.

The village has pre-Norman Conquest origins; the Walton Cross is believed to be dated from the 11th century.

The name Hartshead is derived from Herteshevet or Herteshede which is Scandinavian in origin and means Hill of Heort, Heort meaning Hart in modern English.

Patrick Brontë met his wife, Maria Branwell (they met in Rawdon, some dozen or so miles away from Hartshead) in 1811, when he was parson of Church of St Peter in Hartshead. They were married in Guiseley and became the parents of Anne, Branwell, Charlotte and Emily Brontë.

Kirklees Hall is between Hartshead and the nearby village of Clifton.

Robin Hood is reputed to have been buried near Hartshead or in the grounds of the nearby Kirklees Hall. The exact place is not known, as the gravestone has been moved at least 3 times.

end of Wikipedia contribution

Clifton, as referred to in the Wikipedia article is Clifton (near Hartshead).

Hartshead and Clifton were part of the Halifax Rural District from 1894 until 1937. Upon the abolition of the rural district in 1937, the two parishes were split between Brighouse and Spenborough Urban Districts.

Historically, Hartshead was in the ecclesiastical parish of Dewsbury in the Morley Division of the wapentake of Agbrigg and Morley.

Research Tips

• GENUKI on Hartshead. The GENUKI page gives numerous references to local bodies providing genealogical assistance.
• The FamilySearch wiki on the ecclesiastical parish of Dewsbury provides a list of useful resources for the local area.
• A Vision of Britain through Time on Hartshead.
• 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.