West Yorkshire Non Conformist records now online at Ancestry

[weenie]

With regards to the new records, i went eagerly searching as many of my ancestors were weslyan. i found my gt grand uncles  marriage in free methodist chapel, to find no signiture's or witness'ss??? very strange i thought? as acording to Yorkshire BMD they have it at Holbeck registered office?

i also asked Ancestry on FB page regarding any more due to come out, and they said not at the moment, as they are trying so hard with the final completion of the 1911 and US 1940 census's

Weenie

[weste]

Found some i can rule out.

[DigleyMill]

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!

[Marmaduke 123]

Thank you for this Digleymill, it should be very useful to me in sorting out some of the Ancestry mysteries.

I've really enjoyed looking at your website too.

Anne

[DigleyMill]

Thanks, I'm glad you like the website

Perhaps we should have a competition to find the best (?) example of ancestry's sloppy indexing! My favourite is a baptism on 25th Sept 1825, Holmfirth, where the indexer has merged two completely separate baptisms (Elizabeth Dickinson & Hannah Hirst) to create a new person Elizabeth Hannah Dickinson! Poor Hannah has disappeared as a result. And then there's those burials recorded as baptisms . . . . and the ones where the baptism or burial of (eg) John son of Joseph Tyas is indexed just as the burial of "John" (ie no surname.

It's also a bit annoying that burials at non conformist chapels tend to appear under the general category of "Birth, Baptisms & Christening", not "Death, Burial, Cemetery & Obituaries" if you try to narrow a search down.

On the plus side though, I've found some absolute gems of information by manually reading through some of the parish records, such as the burials at Holmfirth & Almondbury. This would have been impossible if the images weren't online.

[Tuppie]

Ancestry's list of chapels in this collection certainly seems to confirm that it is incomplete.  For instance only three chapels in the whole Barnsley area - Ardsley, Hoyland Common (both listed as Wakefield) and Penistone (listed as Kirklees) and very few for Sheffield, Rotherham, Doncaster.  Or is Ancestry working on the new West Yorkshire, rather than the old West Ridung?  If so, presumably the above three South Yorks places have been included by mistake.  That said, the more records added, the better, and hopefully others will follow.

Sheffield archives have decided to go with Findmypast for the Anglican parishes and no decision has been made on the methodists. Sheffield & District FHS are now transcribing the non-conformist.

[Marmaduke 123]

Sheffield archives have decided to go with Findmypast for the Anglican parishes and no decision has been made on the methodists. Sheffield & District FHS are now transcribing the non-conformist.

Thanks for this information Tuppie. Is there a timescale for the Sheffield Archives material?

Anne

[Tuppie]

Not at present...the legal team are in discussions with findmypast.

Tuppie

[acorngen]

FindMyPast are getting most of the work because of their connection with TNA.  I still think that archives and FHS's are letting people down by using FindMyPast as their search engine is pathetic however FindMyPast do give money back to those who have transcribed the records which is why the FHS are using them.