Explanatory Notes   

Roger C. Mallinson

28 Jan. 2003

 

 

When I started this research several years ago, in common with most amateur genealogists, I was concerned only with my immediate family, which came from Blagden Farm at Newsome. Gradually, it turned into a virtual one-name study, especially when George Redmonds suggested that most of the Mallinsons in Huddersfield and District could probably be traced back to a single source (in Fixby).

 

Further researches in the All Hallows, Almondbury parish registers showed that my own branch had lived at Wheatroyd in Almondbury village, and before that at Greave, near Wilshaw.

 

Having identified distinct branches at Almondbury, Bradley, Huddersfield, Kirkheaton, Lepton, Lindley, Linthwaite, Lockwood, Longwood, Netherthong, New Mill and Shepley, I decided to allocate them Tree numbers in alphabetical order by district, with lower case letters for branches within each geographical area for families which I suspected would eventually prove to be interconnected.

 

This has proved to be a rather more illogical scheme than I at first realised.  It would be preferable to start from scratch with an entirely different system, preferably one not  based on geography, but the thought of ploughing through that enormous data-base reassigning codes fills me with dread, and, in a sense, the system is really unimportant as long as one has access to the Index explaining which tree is which. The links within the Gedcom file are more important for anyone using my database for the first time.

 

An early casualty of the organic system is the apparent dichotomy between Trees 3 and 13. John Mallinson, 1550 of Dearscroft, Salendine Nook, was the elder brother of William Mallinson, 1560 of Bradley Hall. They were the sons of Thomas Mallinson, born circa 1528; whose marriage pre-dates the earliest St. Peter's marriage registers (1580) by some thirty years or more. I should give credit here to an indefatigable professional genealogist, now deceased, called William R. Thorp, of South Milford, a tiny village just off the A63 from Leeds to Selby. Martha Pereson, née Mallinson, of Illinois, retained him. His methodical and carefully documented work saved me a great deal of searching, particularly the wills he had consulted at the Borthwick Institute. Unfortunately, the one thing he lacked was a close knowledge of the geography of Huddersfield. John Mallinson lived at Ball Royd and Longwood House before he moved to Dearscroft. With the wayward spelling characteristic of old documents, Ball Royd appears variously as Bull Royd, Ball Roid, Ballroid and Baleroide in the St. Peter's PRs, often for succeeding children of the same parents at annual intervals. Thorp misread Ball Royd as "Bokroyd" and assumed, naturally that Longwood House would be in the district of Longwood, which is not far from Dearscroft. In fact, Longwood House is at Netheroyd Hill and Ball Royd, which appears on the 25 inch O/S 1898 map, just to the south east, is long-vanished, but commemorated by Ball Royd Road, Fartown. After the first generation, both branches, 3 and 13, lived at Dearscroft and should therefore be united and given a code-number 10x for Lindley. However, it suited me to leave them separated for the entirely practical reason that each tree covers several sheets of A4 when printed out and they are more manageable kept distinct. There is also the sad fact that Tree 13, despite extensive ramification, seems to have died out in the male line, though I look forward to hearing from a Mallinson descendant who can trace his or her line back to it.

 

Sharp-eyed critics will have noticed that Tree 18a, Ripponden, is not correctly placed alphabetically. The explanation is that I researched it after I had constructed the original code and there was no available integer between 15c, New Mill, and 16, Shepley. Later, when I widened the parameters of search beyond Huddersfield & District, I realised that it would have been better to include it as R1 in the second set.