Place:Scammonden, West Riding of Yorkshire, England

source: Family History Library Catalog

the following text is based on an article in Wikipedia

Scammonden or Dean Head was a village close to Huddersfield, in West Yorkshire, England, before the valley was flooded to create Scammonden Reservoir in the 1960s.

Historically in the West Riding of Yorkshire, Scammonden or Dean Head was a township covering more than 2,000 acres. In the 1870s it had a church, a Baptist chapel, a national school, a post office and 190 houses. Industry in the village included cotton-spinning and woollen manufacture and there were freestone quarries.

There has been a chapel in Scammonden since 1615 and the church remains active. Scammonden was a chapelry in the Huddersfield ecclesiastical parish. Its old chapel was rebuilt at a cost of £1000 in 1813. It was replaced by the church in 1865.

Scammonden was in the ecclesiastical parish of Huddersfield in the Agbrigg Division of the wapentake of Agbrigg and Morley. From 1894 until 1937, Scammonden was an urban district. In 1937 the urban district was abolished and the area was absorbed into the neighbouring Colne Valley Urban District. In 1974, as part of the nationwide reorganization of municipalities, this part of the West Riding was absorbed into the Kirklees Metropolitan Area.

Research Tips

• GENUKI on Scammonden. The GENUKI page gives numerous references to local bodies providing genealogical assistance.
• The FamilySearch wiki on the ecclesiastical parish of Huddersfield provides a list of useful resources for the local area.
• A Vision of Britain through Time on Scammonden.
• A Vision of Britain through Time also provides links to three maps for what is now South Yorkshire, produced by the United Kingdom Ordnance Survey, illustrating the boundaries between the civil parishes and the rural districts at various dates. These maps all blow up to a scale that will illustrate small villages and large farms or estates.

• Ordnance Survey West Riding 1888. The "Sanitary Districts (which preceded the rural districts) for the whole of the West Riding.
• Ordnance Survey West Riding South 1900. The rural and urban districts, not long after their introduction. (the southern part of Bradford, the southern part of Leeds, the southern part of Tadcaster Rural District, the southern part of Selby, Goole Rural District, and all the divisions of Halifax, Huddersfield, Wakefield, Doncaster, Barnsley, Rotherham and Sheffield)
• Ordnance Survey West Riding 1944. The urban and rural districts of the whole of the West Riding after the revisions of 1935.