Place:Whitkirk, West Riding of Yorkshire, England

source: Family History Library Catalog

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

Whitkirk is a suburb of east Leeds, situated between Cross Gates to the north, Austhorpe to the east, Killingbeck to the west, Colton to the south-east and Halton to the south-west. The Temple Newsam estate lies directly south of the area.

It falls into the Temple Newsam ward of Leeds City Council and Leeds East parliamentary constituency.

History

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

A church is recorded in The Domesday Survey (1086) as belonging to the manor of Gipton and Colton, and as Whitkirk is the only known medieval church in these area of Leeds, it is reasonable to assume that it is Whitkirk church that is being referred to, in which case it must have a late Anglo- Saxon origin at least. The first mention of Whitkirk itself is in 1154–66 in the Early Yorkshire Charters as ‘Witechirche’, meaning ‘white church’. The name has Old English origins, with the ‘chirche’ element subsequently being replaced by the Old Norse ‘kirkja’. It is possible that the church was the focus of settlement activity at this period extending into the later medieval.

The renowned civil engineer John Smeaton was born in the local parish of Austhorpe and is buried in Whitkirk churchyard.

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