Place:Rishworth, West Riding of Yorkshire, England

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

source: Family History Library Catalog

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

"RISHWORTH, a township in Halifax parish, [West Riding of] Yorkshire; 6 miles S W of Halifax. Acres: 6,190. Real property: £4,551. Population in 1851: 1,540; in 1861: 1, 244. Houses: 252. The manor belongs to the trustees of the Savile estates. Cotton-spinning and paper-making are carried on. There is a large endowed school, giving board and education to 30 boys in the upper department, to 25 boys in the lower department, and to 15 girls."

Rishworth was a township in the ancient and ecclesiastical parish of Halifax within the Morley division of the wapentake of Agbrigg and Morley in the West Riding of Yorkshire. It was an urban district from 1894 to 1937 when it was abolished to create Ripponden Urban District. Since 1974 Rishworth is a village in Calderdale District of the administrative county of West Yorkshire, England.

Research Tips

• GENUKI on Rishworth. 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 Barkisland.
• 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.