Place:Tanshelf, West Riding of Yorkshire, England

source: Family History Library Catalog

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

"TANSHELF, a township in Pontefract parish, [West Riding of] Yorkshire; adjacent to the W end of Pontefract. Acres, 270. Real property, £2,737. Pop. in 1851, 601; in 1861, 776. Houses, 160. There are several neat villas."

Historically, Tanshelf was in the ecclesiastical parish of Pontefract in the wapentake of Osgoldcross. From 1875 until 1920, Tanshelf was located within Pontefract Municipal Borough district. In 1920 it was completely merged into Pontefract civil parish.

Research Tips

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