Place:Clayton (near Bradford), West Riding of Yorkshire, England

source: Family History Library Catalog

source: Family History Library Catalog

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

Clayton, or Clayton Village, is a civil parish in the City of Bradford metropolitan borough in West Yorkshire, England, situated to the west of Bradford city centre. It is listed in the Domesday Book, meaning it dates back to at least the 11th century and was privately owned from 1160 to 1866. It was noted for its clay. More recently, Clayton was a key location in the British and international wool trade, being the home of the British Wool Marketing Board headquarters. The old building was demolished and converted into housing in the late 1990s. The village re-acquired civil parish status with a parish council in 2004.

The main street of the village – Clayton Lane – which runs alongside the park, includes several traditional pubs, a popular crawl route for many residents. Starting at the top of the lane is the Fleece, moving down past the Royal Hotel to the Albion and the Black Bull – the oldest pub in the area.The Fiddlers Three and the Quarry Arms have now shut down. There are also several shops, churches and a nearby golf club and reservoir at Clayton Heights (now designated as a Country Park) with views of the city of Bradford and the village of Thornton across the valley.

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

"CLAYTON, a township and a chapelry in Bradford parish, [West Riding of] Yorkshire. The township lies 3½ miles W by S of Bradford; contains the villages of Clayton-Heights and Queens-Head; and has a post office under Bradford, Yorkshire. Acres: 1,610. Real property: £9,145; of which £825 are in mines, and £965 in quarries. Population: 5,655. Houses: 1,172. The woollen manufacture is extensively carried on. The chapelry does not include all the township; and was constituted in 1858. Population: 3,228. Houses, 674. The living is a [perpetual] curacy in the diocese of Ripon. Value, £55. Patron, the Vicar of Bradford. The church was built in 1851, and is in the decorated English style; and there are chapels for Baptists and Wesleyans, and a national school."

Historically, Clayton was in the ecclesiastical parish of Bradford in the Morley Division of the wapentake of Agbrigg and Morley. Clayton was incorporated into Bradford in 1930. Between 1894 and 1930 it had been an urban district.

Research Tips

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