3. Documentary Research gets underway – December 2009

The Documentary Research group have already made several visits to archives and record offices across Yorkshire – documents relating to Embsay are scattered surprisingly widely, partly because the parish used to lie within the West Riding of Yorkshire, but was later incorporated into the county of North Yorkshire. So far we have found relevant documents in archives at Skipton, Leeds, Bradford, Northallerton, Halifax and Wakefield. In tracking down these documents we have found the A2A online catalogue the National Archives Access to Archives; see http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/a2a/ ) extremely helpful as a starting point.

So far, the majority of the documents we have come across are from the early modern period – that is, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – although we have also come across printed transcripts of earlier sources such as the Poll Tax of 1379. For the most part, the primary sources are providing us with a mass of data on property owners through several centuries of Embsay’s history.

We are also working on the parish registers, a copy of the tithe map of 1847 and references to the parish in the local newspaper, The Craven Herald and Pioneer (which takes us back to 1855).

Jane Lunnon, UWHG Archivist