Place:Stansfield, West Riding of Yorkshire, England

source: Family History Library Catalog

A Vision of Britain through Time provides the following description of Stansfield from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1870-72:

"STANSFIELD, a township, of three divisions, in Halifax parish, [West Riding of] Yorkshire; on the river Calder, the Rochdale canal, and the Lancashire and Yorkshire railway, 4½ miles W of Halifax. It has post-offices under Todmorden; and it contains Crosstone church, three dissenting chapels, and a national school. Acres: 5,920. Real property: £25,419; of which £570 are in quarries, and £250 in gasworks. Pop. in 1851: 7,627; in 1861: 8,174. Houses: 1,671. The manor belongs to the Earl of Scarborough. Much of the land is moor. Cotton-spinning, silk-spinning, and iron-founding are carried on."

Historically, Stansfield was in the ecclesiastical parish of Halifax in the Morley Division of the wapentake of Agbrigg and Morley. Between 1894 and 1897, Stansfield was gradually absorbed into Blackshaw, Todmorden and Hebden Bridge civil parishes.

Research Tips

• GENUKI on Stansfield. 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 Stansfield.
• 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.