Forum:Yorkshire

Ridings, wapentakes, dioceses, etc
Anyone interested in Yorkshire's genealogy (such as AMK and I, both of whom have Harrison (surname) ancestors born in the Wakefield diocese!) will have come across the ridings: East Riding of Yorkshire, North Riding of Yorkshire, and West Riding of Yorkshire, though a minority will have been aware of the fictional TV show "South Riding". Ridings were each divided into about a dozen wapentakes.

Subdivision boundary changes
Local government reform started in a minor way in 1835 with some borough corporation reform, and there were sporadic changes every few decades after that. Since the 1970s there have been at least two major reorganisations of local government affecting Yorkshire, with East Riding of Yorkshire disappearing then reappearing while the others got cut about and renamed. North Riding of Yorkshire remains roughly recognisable as North Yorkshire, but West Riding of Yorkshire is now mostly South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire while North Yorkshire, Manchester, Lancashire, and Cumbria have taken bites out of it.

Place names
Wikipedia names places in Yorkshire with just their names if unique but adds the current local government area (e.g. Aldbrough, Aughton, South Yorkshire or Carlton, Selby) when a place needs disambiguation.

In view of the changes since most of our ancestors had their details recorded, I wonder whether we should have a policy of adding merely "Yorkshire" when a place needs disambiguation but there was only one of them in the whole county. (I know that some readers would like the country added too; but that's a lot of extra work for extremely little benefit, because anyone interested enough in the place to wonder which country it's in will surely click on the article and should see the country name near the start of the article.)

Robin Patterson 10:32, 3 August 2008 (UTC)