Place:Rotherham, West Riding of Yorkshire, England

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source: Family History Library Catalog

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

Rotherham is a large market and minster town in South Yorkshire, England. The town takes its name from the River Rother which then merges with the River Don. The River Don then flows through the town centre. It is the main settlement of the Metropolitan Borough of Rotherham. Rotherham is also the third largest settlement in South Yorkshire after Sheffield and Doncaster, which it is located between.

Traditional industries included glass making and flour milling. Most around the time of the industrial revolution, it was also known as a coal mining town as well as a contributor to the steel industry.

The town's historic county is Yorkshire. From 1889 until 1974, the County of York's ridings became counties in their own right, the West Riding of Yorkshire was the town's county while South Yorkshire is its current county.

Rotherham had a population of 109,691 in the 2011 census. The borough, governed from the town, had a population of , the most populous district in England.

Note: Rotherham is 6 miles (10 km) from Sheffield City Centre.

The civil parishes represented by the numbers on the map will be found on the pages for Rotherham Rural District and Kiveton Park Rural District.

History

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

Early history

Iron Age and Roman settlements are known in the area covered by the district. This includes a small Roman fort to the south-west in the upper flood meadow of the Don at Templeborough.

Rotherham was founded in the very early Middle Ages. Its name is from Old English hām 'homestead, estate', meaning 'homestead on the Rother'. The river name is of Brittonic origin for 'main river', ro- 'over, chief' and duβr 'water'. Another river that also came to be called the Rother is in East Sussex. The Anglo-Saxon settlement, with an ecclesiastical parish, was established on a Roman road's ford over the River Don and the area around it.

The 1086 Domesday Book records a manor previously held by lord Hakon in 1066 tenanted by William the Conqueror's half-brother, Robert de Mortain. The 1086 record shows an absentee lord who held the most inhabited manor, Nigel Fossard. Today's town area also includes eight outlying Domesday estates. Eight adult male householders were counted as villagers, three were smallholders and one the priest, three ploughlands were tilled by one lord's plough team and two and a half men's plough teams were active. The manor also had a church, roughly four acres of meadow and seven woodland acres. Rotherham had a mill valued at half a pound sterling.^[1]

Nigel Fossard's successors, the De Vesci family, rarely visited the town and did not build a castle. However, they maintained a Friday market and a fair. In the mid 13th century, John de Vesci and Ralph de Tili gave all their possessions in Rotherham to Rufford Abbey. It was part of a period of growing wealth for the church. The monks collected tithes from the town and gained rights to an extra market day on Monday and to extend the annual fair from two to three days.

The townsmen of Rotherham formed the "Greaves of Our Lady's Light", an organisation which worked with the town's three guilds. It was suppressed in 1547 but revived in 1584 as the feoffees of the common lands of Rotherham, and remains in existence.^[1]

In the 1480s the Rotherham-born Archbishop of York, Thomas Rotherham, instigated the building of a College of Jesus or Jesus College, Rotherham to rival the colleges of Cambridge and Oxford. It was the first brick building in what is now South Yorkshire and taught theology, religious chant and hymns, grammar and writing.^[1]

The College and new parish church of All Saints made Rotherham an enviable and modern town at the turn of the 16th century. The college was dissolved in 1547 in the reign of Edward VI, its assets stripped for the crown to grant to its supporters. Very little remains of the original building in College Street. Walls of part of the College of Jesus are encased within number 23 and Nos 2, 2A, 4 (later for a time Old College Inn, a beerhouse), 6 and 8 Effingham Street. A doorway was rescued from the demolition and relocated to nearby Boston Park in 1879. Fragments of walls are the earliest surviving brick structure in South Yorkshire and are remains of the key institution to Rotherham's growth into a town of regional significance. Sixty years after the College's dissolution Rotherham was described by a wealthy visitor as falling from a fashionable college town to having admitted gambling and vice. The history of Thomas Rotherham and education in the town are remembered in the name of Thomas Rotherham College.

Industrial Revolution

The region had been exploited for iron since Roman times, but it was coal that first brought the Industrial Revolution to Rotherham. Exploitation of the coal seams was the driving force behind the improvements to navigation on the River Don, which eventually formed the Sheffield and South Yorkshire Navigation system of navigable inland waterways.

In the early Industrial Revolution major uses of iron demanded good local ore and established processing skills for iron strength, qualities found in Rotherham's smelting plants and foundries. Iron, and later steel, became the principal industry in Rotherham, surviving into the 20th century. The Walker family built an iron and steel empire in the 18th century, their foundries producing high quality cannon, including some for the ship of the line HMS Victory, and cast iron bridges, one of which was commissioned by Thomas Paine.

Rotherham's cast iron industry expanded rapidly in the early 19th century, the Effingham Ironworks, later Yates, Haywood & Co, opened in 1820. Other major iron founders included William Corbitt and Co; George Wright and Co of Burton Weir; Owen and Co of Wheathill Foundry; Morgan Macauley and Waide of the Baths Foundry; the Masbro’ Stove Grate Co belonging to Messrs. Perrot, W. H. Micklethwait and John and Richard Corker of the Ferham Works. G & WG Gummer Ltd exported brass products across the world, supplying fittings for hotels, hospitals, Turkish baths and the RMS Mauretania. Their fittings could also be found on five battleships used in World War II and HMS Ark Royal.

The Parkgate Ironworks was established in 1823 by Sanderson and Watson, and changed ownership several times. In 1854, Samuel Beal & Co produced wrought iron plates for Isambard Kingdom Brunel's famous steamship the SS Great Eastern. In 1864, the ironworks was taken over by the Parkgate Iron Co. Ltd, becoming the Park Gate Iron and Steel Company in 1888. The company was purchased by Tube Investments Ltd in 1956 and closed in 1974. Steel, Peech and Tozer's massive Templeborough steelworks (now the Magna Science Adventure Centre) was, at its peak, over a mile (1.6 km) long, employing 10,000 workers, and housing six electric arc furnaces producing 1.8 million tonnes of steel a year. The operation closed down in 1993.

The first railway stations, Holmes and Rotherham Westgate both on the Sheffield and Rotherham Railway opened on 31 October 1838. Holmes station was located close to the works of Isaac Dodds and Son, pioneers in the development of railway technology. Later railway stations included Parkgate and Aldwarke railway station on the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway, which opened in July 1873, the Parkgate and Rawmarsh railway station on the North Midland Railway and the Rotherham Masborough railway station also on the North Midland Railway.

Rotherham Forge and Rolling Mill occupied an island in the river known as Forge Island. It's managing director was Francis Charles Moss of Wickersley before his death in 1942. The site was later occupied by a Tesco superstore and is set to be the location for a new leisure development with a proposed cinema, food and drink outlets and a hotel.

Joseph Foljambe established a factory to produce his Rotherham plough, the first commercially successful iron plough.

A glass works was set up in Rotherham in 1751, and became Beatson Clark & Co, one of the town's largest manufacturers, exporting glass medicine bottles worldwide. Beatson Clark & Co was a family business until 1961, when it became a public company. The glass works operated on the same site, although the family connection ceased and the company is owned by Newship Ltd, a holding company linked to the industrialist John Watson Newman. It continues to the manufacture glass containers for the pharmaceutical, food and drinks industries. In the 19th century, other successful industries included pottery, brass making and the manufacture of cast iron fireplaces. Precision manufacturing companies in the town include AESSEAL, Nikken Kosakusho Europe, MTL Advanced, MGB Plastics and Macalloy. Rotherham is the location of the Advanced Manufacturing Park (AMP), which is home to a number of world-class companies including Rolls-Royce and McLaren Automotive.

Milling grain into flour was a traditional industry in Rotherham, formerly in the Millmoor area, hence Rotherham United F.C.'s nickname "The Millers". Flour milling continued at the Rank Hovis town mill site on Canklow Road until September 2008. The site of the mill is a warehousing and distribution facility for Premier Foods.

Enterprise Zone 1983

In 1983 Rotherham became a designated Enterprise Zone with benefits and incentives given to attract new industry and development in the area. Within the first year ten new companies were established within the zone. The former chemical works at Barbot Hall, which had been empty and derelict, was developed into a new industrial estate and named 'Brookside', after Mangham Brook, running alongside it.

Floods of 2007

Rotherham was affected by flooding in the summer of 2007, which caused the closure of central roads, schools, transport services and damaged residential and commercial property, including the Parkgate Shopping complex and the Meadowhall Centre, which suffered considerable internal water damage. Ulley Reservoir caused major concern and forced the evacuation of thousands of homes when its dam showed signs of structural damage, threatening to break and release water into the suburbs of Treeton, Brinsworth and Canklow as well as potentially flooding the Junction 33 electrical sub-station. Rother FM evacuated its studios, passing its frequency temporarily to neighbouring station Trax FM. A stretch of the M1 motorway was closed for three days owing to the flood risk in the event of a breach of the reservoir. Fire service and police officers used thirteen high-powered pumps to lower the water level in the reservoir and reduce pressure on the dam wall, which was damaged but held. By summer 2008, the reservoir and surrounding country park reopened.

A new wetland and flood storage area, Centenary Riverside park, has since been built by Rotherham Council and the Environment Agency to prevent flooding in the future. The Wildlife Trust for Sheffield and Rotherham manages the site as a local nature reserve. The site is home to the massive sculpture Steel Henge, a Stonehenge replica which is in fact made from iron ingots.

Child sexual exploitation scandal

Following a 2012 article published in The Times alleging the cover-up of organised, large-scale sexual abuse of young children by gangs of people of Pakistani origin in Rotherham, Rotherham Council commissioned Professor Alexis Jay, a former chief social work adviser to the Scottish government, to lead an independent inquiry about the handling of the cases and a suspected child exploitation network. She issued an exploitation report stretching beyond police-level investigated cases. Her report of August 2014 revealed an unprecedented scale of reported child sexual abuse within an urban area of this size over a 16-year period. Subsequently, Eric Pickles, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, commissioned Louise Casey to conduct a Best Value investigation of Rotherham Council. She issued a report of her findings in February 2015.

Both reports stated that a majority of the known perpetrators were of Pakistani heritage, and reported a denial of severity which was to a large extent the responsibility of Councillors. Casey's report concluded that at the time of her inspection the Council was not , and identified some necessary measures for preventing further repetition.^[2] On 4 February 2015, after receiving Casey's report, Pickles said that commissioners would be appointed to run the council pending new elections, and the council leader and cabinet resigned en masse to allow for a 'fresh start'. The National Crime Agency was called in to investigate whether Rotherham councillors were complicit in hiding the depth and scale of the child abuse (the figure of 1,400 children is now said to be conservative) due to a "fear of losing their jobs and pensions" following a concern that they might be considered "racist" if they spoke out. Also, according to the new report, the councillors were driven by "political correctness".

Jayne Senior, a former youth town worker, was reported to have worked for more than a decade to expose rampant child sexual abuse in Rotherham, but she was met with "indifference and scorn". Senior was awarded an MBE in the 2016 Birthday Honours.

Research Tips

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