Genuki Yorkshire

• Navigating the site: The whole of the Genuki site is built in a strict hierarchical manner. Once you understand how the hierarchy is arranged, you will find it fairly easy to navigate the site. I have drawn a diagram showing the hierarchy of the Genuki and Genuki Yorkshire pages and also a page giving information about how these pages were developed with what you will find (and what you won't find) within these pages.
• The old county of Yorkshire was unusual in not only being split into 4 (3 Ridings and the Ainsty), but also in having some very large parishes. With some counties (such as Cheshire) virtually every village was also a parish, however this is not the case with Yorkshire and so some means of finding out which town, village or hamlet is in which parish was needed. To this end I developed the "Where is it in Yorkshire" pages which will take you directly to the relevant Riding and parish, but please read the notes on the main page before jumping in at the deep end!
• Navigating the old pre 1974 Yorkshire: The modern Yorkshire bears little resemblance to the old Yorkshire of pre 1974 times. Of course the places haven't moved, just the boundaries. Please do not confuse "North Yorkshire" with "The North Riding", "East Yorkshire" (or even the modern East Riding) with "The East Riding", etc. etc. they are by no means the same. To assist in navigation around the county you will find maps of Yorkshire on the main Yorkshire page: a detailed map, maps of parishes for each Riding, and a map showing the wapentakes. On each of the parish pages you will find a map showing the position of the parish in the Riding, and a link to various map sites (such as "Old Maps", Google maps etc) which uses the Grid reference of the parish and the places within it to give positional information when fetching the map(s).
• Grid References: most of the places listed on this site have associated Ordnance Survey Landranger map Grid References associated with them. These are currently most obvious under the heading of "Names (Geographical)" on the relevant parish pages, where I have no information on the places listed other than the LR Grid Reference. These, and the other grid references, are used by the "Nearby Places" search engine (there's a link to this at the top of each parish page) in order to ascertain which places are within the appropriate radius of the given parish town, and the grid references of each place will be found on the results page. (It is my intention when time allows to add all the grid references to the parish pages). These grid references were generated by hand (and maps!) by a group of volunteers. I have not as yet processed all the data they produced, but on the other hand, some of the volunteers haven't completed their task either (nearly 3 years later).
• Definitions of terms: Yorkshire, along with other northern counties in England used Wapentakes as administrative areas (instead of "Hundreds"), and you will also find the term "Dale", "Wolds" etc. used within the text. If you come across a term that you don't understand, then please have a look on the "definitions of terms" pages.
• If you get confused with (or don't understand at all) any of the ecclesiastical terms, then try the "church definitions" page.
• The pages on the Genuki Yorkshire site are intended to download very quickly to your computer. There are no pages with multiple photographs on them, and you should be made aware when you are going to a page with a photograph on it, and therefore know that you may have to wait for it to download. There are however some pages which have large table of transcribed records on them, and these will take some time (say 10 seconds at the most) to download. I have done my best to split these tables so that you get something to read while the rest is downloading, but there are still some that I haven't yet changed to this format.
• Don't forget about the Genuki Yorkshire search engine. This search engine searches only the Genuki Yorkshire pages and a few external sites which deal with Yorkshire and its records, and includes the Yorkshire surnames interest list. There is a link to the Yorkshire section of the search engine at the top of the main Genuki Yorkshire page. There is also a Genuki search engine that covers the whole of Genuki and some external sites such as the Public Records Office, and you will find a link to this by going via the "Genuki contents" link at the top of the main Genuki Yorkshire page.

• There are very few pages on this site with a preset background, and those that have a preset background are grey. If you find that the pages have a white background and you would prefer "a more restful on the eyes" grey, then you can change to this as follows if you use
• Internet Explorer:
  • Click on
    • Tools
  • then click on
    • Internet Options....
  • then click on the button marked:
    • Colours
  • untick the options
    • use Windows colours
  • click on OK and then OK again to return to normal.
  • This will of course change the options for all sites.
• Firefox:
  • Click on
    • Tools
  • then click on
    • Options....
  • then click on the tab marked:
    • Content
  • then click on the button marked:
    • Colours
  • untick the option
    • use sytem colours
  • tick the option:
    • allow pages to use their own colours....
  • click on OK and then OK again to return to normal.
  • This will of course change the options for all sites.
• Greyed out "Back arrows". I didn't really want to have to implement the feature that causes the "Greying out" of the browser back arrows (i.e. there is no "back"), but due to the way some web-masters have implemented scripts, pop-ups etc. on their sites, the users going to their sites find that they can't get back to Genuki without having to start again. In order to get round this problem, virtually all the external links on this site will cause a new browser window to be produced. This will only be apparent to you if you notice that you have another browser running on the task bar, and that the Back Arrow has been greyed out. If you come across this situation, simply kill off the offending window and you will return to the Genuki page that you left from.

• Some web sites which implement "Frames" attempt to "capture" the page(s) linked to. Virtually all of the Genuki site pages have "anti frame" code in them to prevent other sites from trying to claim the Genuki pages as theirs (or make the user believe that they are). One problem with the "anti frame" code is that it also removes the capability to return to the calling site in some cases. This is a problem with the site containing the link to Genuki and not the Genuki pages. If you come across this situation, you might like to ask the relevant site web-master to desist from this practice.

This site is

• "office friendly" i.e. no music
• and user friendly
  • no "pop ups" or banners
  • no frames - you can bookmark any page in order to return at a later date.
  • no script driven pages. The only pages with any script are the "contact" pages.
  • no "click here to enter" splash pages (indeed, no "click here" syndrome at all)
  • no internal links to pages which take a long time to download, without warning.
  • no verbose html, - you get maximum information in the minimum time.