Place:Balby with Hexthorpe, West Riding of Yorkshire, England

source: Family History Library Catalog

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

When rural and urban districts were established in 1894, Balby with Hexthorpe was considered a civil parish within Doncaster Rural District in the West Riding of Yorkshire. The following year it was constituted an urban district in its own right. In 1921 the urban district was abolished to enlarge Doncaster Municipal Borough. Historically it was in the ancient parish of Doncaster and in the Soke of Doncaster. Balby, the larger settlement, is now a suburb of Doncaster located to the south-west of the borough, while Hexthorpe is a small village located on the borough's edge. They both now lie within the Metropolitan Borough of Doncaster, South Yorkshire, England which is a unitary authority.

History

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

The earliest written reference to Balby occurs in the Domesday Book (1086), which records the name as Balle(s)bi. This almost certainly derives from a personal name, Balli, together with the Old Norse word býr (meaning a farmstead). This dates the foundation of Balby to some time in the period of Viking settlement, between the late 8th and early 11th centuries.

Balby, which then included Warmsworth, was home to several of the early followers of the Quaker faith in England, including Thomas Aldham, whose son William was instrumental in opening the first permanent meeting house in the area, in Quaker Lane, Warmsworth. Balby has long been associated, along with other areas of Doncaster, with having a large Quaker community.

More recently, the suburban town was a centre for steel and brass manufacture, especially at the well-known Pegler's Brass Foundry and Bridon Ropery. In the early 20th century, St Catherine's Hospital was built in the south of Balby, near to the site of St Catherine's Well, an ancient site of healing and pilgrimage. It is now a hospital estate.

For more information, see the EN Wikipedia article Hexthorpe.

Research Tips

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