Place:Idle, West Riding of Yorkshire, England

source: Family History Library Catalog

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

Idle is a residential suburban area in the city of Bradford, West Yorkshire, in England and was a separate village, and before that it was the Manor of Idle. Idle is loosely bordered by the areas of Eccleshill, Wrose, Thackley, Apperley Bridge, and Greengates, in the north-east of the city.

Historically, Idle was in the ecclesiastical parish of Calverley in the Morley Division of the wapentake of Agbrigg and Morley. Idle was absorbed into the city of Bradford in 1899 after being an urban district since 1894.

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:

"IDLE, a village, a township, a chapelry, and a subdistrict, in Bradford district, [West Riding of] Yorkshire. The Village stands on a declivity on the S side of Airedale, adjacent to the Leeds and Liverpool canal and to the river Aire, 3 miles N by E of Bradford; is large and irregularly built; carries on a very considerable woollen cloth manufacture; and has a post office under Leeds, and two annual cattle fairs. A railway from it to Bradford was authorised in 1866; and another from that line to Shipley, 2½ miles, in 1867.--The township contains also the village of Windhill, and the hamlets of Thackley, Thorpe-Green, Parkhill, Cross-Keys, Buckmill, and Wrose; and is in Calverley parish. Acres: 2,420. Real property: £21,003; of which £124 are in mines, and £2,480 in quarries. Pop. in 1851: 7,118; in 1861: 9,155. Houses: 2,056. The increase of pop. arose from the extension of the woollen cloth manufacture. The manor belongs to W. R. Stansfield, Esq. ...."

Research Tips

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