- the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia
Bonsall is a village and civil parish in the Derbyshire Dales District on the edge of the Peak District. The civil parish population was 775 at the 2001 UK census, increasing to 803 at the 2011 UK census. (There may have been a boundary change between the two censuses.)
Bonsall is about 5 miles (8 km) from Matlock and about 18 miles (29 km) from Derby. Bonsall has a long history of lead mining, along with its neighbouring town of Wirksworth.
Bonsall inhabitants have been involved in the textile industry, before and after the inventions of Richard Arkwright (1732-1792) revolutionized the industry. Around 1850 Bonsall was a farming village surrounded by lead mines and busy outworker frame-knitting workshops. A few 18th- and 19th-century frame-knitting workshop buildings survive. Many people also worked in the cotton spinning mills at Cromford and the Via Gellia (see Hopton and Griffe Grange). In early modern times Bonsall was on an important salters' (distributors of salt) route, and was a staging post on the road between Derby and Manchester.
- end of Wikipedia contribution
Bonsall was originally an ancient parish in the Wirksworth Hundred of Derbyshire, England. As an ancient parish it had no any subsidiary chapelries or townships.
It was made a civil parish in 1866 and in 1894 it became an urban district which was merged into Matlock Urban District in 1934. Since 1974 it has been in the non-metropolitan Derbyshire Dales non-metropolitan district.
Research Tips
- Derbyshire Record Office website
- British History Online (Victoria County Histories) does not appear to cover Derbyshire geographically. A History of the County of Derby: Volume 2, edited by William Page is a part-volume covering the religious houses of the county. No further volumes have been found.
- GENUKI main page for Derbyshire which provides information on various topics covering the whole of the county, and also a link to a list of parishes. Under each parish there is a list of the settlements within it and brief description of each. This is a list of pre-1834 ancient or ecclesiastical parishes but there are suggestions as to how to find parishes set up since then. GENUKI provides references to other organizations who hold genealogical information for the local area. There is no guarantee that the website has been kept up to date and therefore the reader should check additional sources if possible.
- The FamilyTree Wiki has a series of pages similar to those provided by GENUKI which may have been prepared at a later date and from more recent data. The wiki has a link to English Jurisdictions 1851 which gives the registration district and wapentake for each parish, together with statistics from the 1851 census for the area.
- A Vision of Britain through Time, Derbyshire, section "Units and Statistics" leads to analyses of population and organization of the county from about 1800 through 1974. There are pages available for all civil parishes, municipal boroughs and other administrative divisions. Descriptions provided are usually based on a gazetteer of 1870-72 which often provides brief notes on the economic basis of the settlement and significant occurences through its history.
- For a more detailed view of a specific area try a map from the following selection. The oldest series are very clear at the third magnification offered. Comparing the map details with the GENUKI details for the same area is well worthwhile. Sections of the 1900 map showing parish boundaries only have been reproduced on some (but not all) parish pages here in WeRelate.
- Map of Derbyshire illustrating urban and rural districts in 1900 produced by UK Ordnance Survey and provided online by A Vision of Britain through Time. Parish boundaries and settlements within parishes are shown.
- Map of Derbyshire urban and rural districts in 1944 produced by UK Ordnance Survey and provided online by A Vision of Britain through Time. Parish boundaries and settlements within parishes are shown. This is not a repeat of the first map. There were some changes in urban and rural district structure in the 1930s.
- Ordnance Survey map of Derbyshire for 1967 This is the last in this series and was made while Derbyshire was experimenting with the non-metropolitan district structure adopted in 1974. It is a much cleaner map for reading the names of the civil parishes, but the smaller villages are no longer visible.
- These are only three of the series of maps to be found in A Vision of Britain through Time.
|
