Something I have been interested in doing for a while is a one place study — a historical and genealogical study of one particular geographical place. I have seen a few of these before and know what great help they could be to fellow genealogists researching ancestors in that place. I wanted to choose somewhere that I had a genealogical link to, but also one that wasn’t going to be too much of a challenge or work, i.e. a fairly small village, not a huge town or city.
I have decided on Horton in Ribblesdale, a small village in the Yorkshire Dales. My maternal ancestors, the Mittons, have deep roots here and surrounding villages, although they had all moved away to Lancashire and Cumberland by 1901. Horton in Ribblesdale is a picturesque Dales village on the River Ribble, with fabulous views of Pen-y-ghent, one of the Yorkshire Three Peaks.
The census enumeration district includes the village itself, but also the farms and hamlets on the west side of the river such as Selside, up to Ribblehead, Camm; as well as those to the north and south of the village on the east side, such as Low and High Birkwith, New Houses, Brackenbottom, Helwith Bridge and Studfold. Looking at the records available for the village, there are only about 130 households in the 1911 census, so that isn’t too much to transcribe.
I have began looking at some of the farms and houses on the west side of the river to begin with. These farms are all still around today and some of the families occupying them can be traced back through the censuses back to members of the family from the late 18th century. It immediately became obvious that there are several families that owned a lot of land and obviously have deep roots in the area, as the same names crop up many times — Redmayne and Lambert being the two best examples. I also found it interesting to see that many of these families had members that worked on each other’s farms, and that the families often intermarried. It would be possible to construct one big family tree linking them all.
I have also found two significant local industries of employment — the Midland Railway Company and the limestone quarry. If people weren’t farming, they were generally working for one of these two. Housing was built especially for both of them.
My biggest challenge will be trying to find records other than those readily available on Ancestry, such as copies of the parish registers, land tax records, and the like. I think at some point, an actual visit to the village will be in order too, if not just to see the burial site for a few of my ancestors.