RootsChat.Com

You might be interested to know that I have put together my own index to the West Yorkshire non conformist records (on ancestry.co.uk) at www.familiesrevealed.com/page10.htm

It provides a detailed list of the contents of each film, and the start and end image numbers for each section.

At present, it covers all the Kirklees films and about half of the Wakefield ones, which also include many chapels in the Kirklees area. You can use it either to find out what chapel is appearing in a search result (ie by matching the film number and image number against the index), or to locate any records that you might want to browse through.

Please let me know if anyone finds this useful - it might encourage me to index the rest of the Wakefield films!

Thanks for the response.

St John's church Upperthong was built 1846-7, so is too late.

I agree about the West Yorks records on ancestry, that thay are tremendously useful, but I have also found that the indexing (eg transcription of surnames) is appallingly bad in some places, especially for some burials which are recorded as baptisms!

So it's really worthwhile going through the individual images, and I've found some useful missing information this way.

Unfortunately, it hasn't helped with these particular baptisms.

My Sandford ancestors were a bit varied about which churches/chapels they used for baptisms (possibly using just the nearest one for convenience), but they do seem to have been pretty good at actually doing the baptisms, so I do think these will exist somewhere.

I've just discovered that one of the children may have been born at Leeside about 1824 (between Scholes and Jackson Bridge) - according to an 1861 census record - so I think the Jackson Bridge Wesleyan Chapel would have been the most likely option. However, the baptisms are mssing from the HDFHS booklet, and I'm wondering if the chapel's records might not have been all that complete?

Has anyone looked at the film/fiche of Jackson Bridge chapel baptisms and does it look complete?

Thanks, that helps. I've been able to check the IGI batch for the same chapel and the same parents (Jonas and Mary) also appear to have had a son John born 1806. This almost certainly rules them out as potential parents of the John and George who moved to live and work at Magnum.

Marmaduke

Thanks for this, and thanks for all your help with this thread so far - very much appreciated!

I'm pretty sure this is the correct individual, although I had spotted the "Fixby" birthplace in the 1861 census and it did seem a bit odd at first. His 1851 census record gives his birthplace as "Halifax"; and his baptism record gives it as "Rastrick".

But I am sure the families that appears in the 1841, 1851, and 1861 census are the same - they can be linked by the children, especially George and Emma. The census sheets for 1841 and 1851 show them at "Flowery Fields" (near Hade Edge/Bowshaw - appears on 1854 OS map). 1861 just says "Hade Edge".

Joseph's marriage record gives his father as John Mitchell, delver, and his baptism record John Mitchell, delver, abode Rastrick.

I took the same view as Marmaduke that Fixby and Rastrick aren't that far enough apart, and perhaps it depended on who was giving the information for each census?

I had spotted the neighbouring George Mitchell too, and did a bit of work on him. The interesting thing is to see him living at Magnum Bonum in 1841, as one of the three Mitchell families living there, alongside John Mitchell  and another Mitchell family headed by a (slightly younger) James Mitchell. James's family has an elderly Mary Mitchell (age about 70-74).  I wondered if she was a parent of one of the others, with the theory that John (b. 1799) and George (b. 1807) might be brothers, with James (b. abt 1817) a son/nephew looking after his grandmother (and John and George's mother?). This would fit with the picture of three closely related Mitchells moving  together from the Rastrick area circa 1830 to start up at Magnum Bonum, (John already married, the other two finding spouses nearby and marrying in 1833!)  There is a Halifax non-conformist baptism record on IGI for a George Mitchell son of Jonas and Mary Mitchell 9 Feb 1808 which might tie with this and might perhaps be the same Mary, and potentially also John Mitchell's mother.

However, I haven't been able to confirm this, as I haven't been able to find any supporting baptism/marriage records with my limited access to them, and as Holmemoss has already found, there appear to be significant gaps in some of the non-conformist records  in the Rastrick/Brighouse area. So it just remains a theory.