Place:Knottingley, West Riding of Yorkshire, England

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

source: Family History Library Catalog

the following text is based on an article in Wikipedia

Knottingley is a town which, since 1974, has been within the metropolitan borough of the City of Wakefield in West Yorkshire, England on the River Aire and the A1 road. It has a population of 13,503.

From 1938 until 1974 Knottingley was an urban district in the West Riding of Yorkshire and from 1894 until 1938 it was a village in Pontefract Rural District. In the 19th century and before it was a chapelry in the ecclesiastical parish of Pontefract in Osgoldcross Wapentake. It was a Registration subdistrict under Pontefract.

History

Until 1699, it was an important inland river port but, in that year, the Aire was made navigable as far as Leeds, which soon surpassed it. Knottingley continued as a centre for boat building into the twentieth century. In the late nineteenth century, it started glass manufacturing. The town is served by Knottingley railway station.

After 1870, the town became known for glass manufacturing. In 1887 Bagley's Glassworks purchased the rights to the first bottle-making machine, invented by a Ferrybridge postmaster. There is a Bagley's Glass gallery in Pontefract Museum.

Research Tips

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