Welcome
Have you ever wondered if your ancestors owned property in the County of York, or wanted to learn more about the history of your house?
Why not use the Register of Deeds to find out? To find out more about the Register of Deeds click here.
This search facility has been created as part of wider academic research projects led by historian, Dr Joan Heggie, formerly of Teesside University, but now a freelance historian and Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College, London.
For more information on which datasets have been transcribed, please click here.
Thanks to North Yorkshire County Record Office, West Yorkshire Archive Service and East Riding Archives for their continued support and for giving permission for these databases to be used for public searches.
Use the search bar above to search the database by surname, by Township, or by year.
More Indexes will be added in the future, so remember to bookmark this site and check back now and again to see what updates have been added.
Latest News
- Kingston upon Hull Datasets Added
All transactions for Kingston upon Hull in the East Riding of the County of York for 1885-1889 inclusive have been added to the search engine. There are 4,307 transactions over the five-year period, containing 13,036 named parties or organisations. Where listed in the original Index, street names are provided.
- New Datasets Added
All transactions for Halifax in the West Riding of the County of York for 1885-1889 inclusive have been added to the search engine. This amounts to 3,045 transactions over the five-year period, containing 9,949 named parties or organisations. Where listed in the original Index, street names are provided.
- Website updated
This website has been extensively updated and a new blog page added, which will help keep visitors informed of new developments. As part of this process, all the datasets have undergone extensive validation to ensure the search facility is robust and returns accurate results. If you have any problems, please do not hesitate to get in touch with me via the Contact page.
- External funding received from the British Academy/ Leverhulme Trust (Small Research Grant, SRG2021_21072)
This grant will fund a two-year project entitled ‘Women as capital lenders in nineteenth-century Yorkshire: Evidence from the Registers of Deeds’.
This project will investigate the role that women played as capital lenders in the expansion of industrial towns and development of middle-class suburbs using mortgage documents from the East, North and West Ridings of Yorkshire. In Phase 1, documents from the towns of Middlesbrough and Scarborough (both in the North Riding of Yorkshire) will be compared for the period 1885-1889. Both towns expanded during this period, but for very different reasons. In Phase 2, similar documents for the towns of Halifax (West Riding) and Kingston upon Hull (East Riding) will be examined and compared with Middlesbrough to establish if women’s financial strategies differed across towns with diverse industrial bases and levels of female economic activity.
- New datasets added – 1853-1864 – ‘M’ Townships
The Indexes for Townships beginning with ‘M’ for the 1853-1864 period have been uploaded to the search facility. This dataset contains over 12,000 new names and includes all transactions for the Township of Middlesbrough.
