Place:Holmfirth, West Riding of Yorkshire, England

the following text is based on an article in Wikipedia

Holmfirth is now a small town on the A6024 Woodhead Road in the modern civil parish (post 1974) of Holme Valley, within the Metropolitan Borough of Kirklees in West Yorkshire, England. Centred upon the confluence of the Holme and Ribble rivers, Holmfirth is south of Huddersfield and northeast of Glossop. It is nestled in the Pennine hills and mostly consists of stone-built cottages. The Peak District National Park is to the south of the town.

Prior to the formation of Holmfirth as a civil parish and urban district, the township was a chapelry in the ecclesiastical parish of Kirkburton and part of the Huddersfield Registration District. Some of the places that later became a part of Holmsfirth were located in the ecclesiastical parish of Almondbury, west of Holmfirth.

History

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

The name Holmfirth derives from Old English holegn ('holly'), in the name of Holme, West Yorkshire, compounded with Middle English frith ('wood'). It thus meant 'the woods at Holme'.

The town originally grew up around a corn mill and bridge in the 13th century. Three hundred years later Holmfirth expanded rapidly as the growing cloth trade grew and the production of stone and slates from the surrounding quarries increased. The present parish church was built in 1778 after the church built in 1476 was swept away in a flood the previous year. Dr Albert Lister Peace was the church's organist, at the age of nine, in the early 1850s. In 1850 Holmfirth railway station opened, on the branch line built by the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Company.

Local men who served and died in the First and Second World Wars are commemorated on the Holme Valley War Memorial found outside Holme Valley Memorial Hospital.

Bamforth & Co

Holmfirth was the home of Bamforth & Co Ltd, who were well known for their cheeky seaside postcards – although around the time of the First World War, the postcards they produced were of a more sober nature. The printing works were on Station Road have now been converted into other use.

Bamforth's company were early pioneers of film-making, before they abandoned the business in favour of postcards. During the early 1900s Holmfirth was well known in this new art form; During the periods 1898–1900 and 1913–1915 Bamforth and Co. produced what the British Film Institute describes as 'a modest but historically significant collection of films'.

Flooding

There are a number of instances when flooding has occurred in the Holme Valley affecting Holmfirth and other settlements in the valley. The earliest recorded Holmfirth flood was in 1738 and the most recent was 1944. The most severe flood occurred early on the morning of 5 February 1852, when the embankment of the Bilberry Reservoir collapsed causing the deaths of 81 people. Following a severe storm in 1777 the River Holme burst its banks, sweeping away people and property with the loss of three lives; the stone church built in 1476, was also swept away. A storm in 1821 again caused the river to burst its banks. The flooding on the night of 29 May 1944 was not nationally reported because it was overshadowed by the D-Day landings the following week.

Research Tips

• A map on the National Library of Scotland website expands to provide a very clear picture of any local area in the UK at the end of the 19th century. The original presentation is a blurred map of the whole of England and Scotland. Clicking on the plus-sign at the top left corner gradually focuses the map until printing is legible. Move to the area you want to inspect with your mouse. Heights are expressed in colours with lowest areas in green and progress to bright orange at higher levels. Holmfirth is to the east (right) of Manchester and northeast of Sheffield.
• GENUKI on Almondbury. GENUKI indexes only the ancient parishes. Townships that later became civil parishes are listed on a "supplementary page" following the page for the main parish. The GENUKI articles only deal with events up until 1820. It is worth glancing through the other places listed on the supplementary page to see if it lists any other communities within Almondbury ancient parish.
• The FamilySearch wiki for Yorkshire (all three ridings) has articles on all parishes--not just ancient parishes.
• A Vision of Britain through Time on Holmfirth.
• 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.

One contributor to WeRelate has provided many pages on the families of the Holmfirth area. For this reason many of the small villages and hamlets are listed separately. The maps listed above will help to lay out the locations of these small places in relation to each other and may thus explain how far a man went to find his bride or why he moved his family from one village to another between censuses.