A Trip To Knaresborough To Visit The Taylor Branch Of The Family

Bicknells, Moores, Taylors, and I haven't even gotten into the Peters, Creasys, or the real juicy story of Lydia Marden who was both a Peters AND a Bicknell.

So to put it into persepctive, my father is William Robert Moore, so that makes me a Moore - Robert Anthony Moore.  His mother (my grandmother) was born Phyllis Taylor.  Her father (my great grandfather) was Samuel Taylor who was born in Knaresborough which is a small town on the River Nidd about 50 miles from York

So today we took the train from York to Knaresoborough to see if we could locate the area where he was born.  Trains run hourly from York to Knaresborough so there wasn't any huge rush to run down to the train station to catch a train.  On arriving in Knaresborough it was a steep climb up Kingsgate Hill to the market square and the tourist information centre to orient my bearings.  My father had done previous research into the Taylor end of the family in the mid 1970s and had traced the roots from Knaresborough into Leeds where he lost the scent.

Samuel Taylor was born on Park Row Knaresborough on February 10, 1843 to Henry Taylor and Hannah Speight.  Not much more was known about Henry or Hannah as my father didn't have the Internet like I have at my fingertips today.  His research was looking at the original parish records, some of which have been recorded on the Internet (like the Moore family in Letheringsett), or else he was looking at microfilm.  It was only in the 1970s that microfilming of parish records, newspapers, and other key documents was being carried out on any scale.  And, as I have found out, the quality of that micro-filming was not the best at times.
After picking up some maps of Knaresborough and orienting myself, I quickly discovered that Park Row was just around the corner.  Sure enough, a 10 minute walk and I was going down the hill towards the short stretch of road called Park Row.  Only one problem.  It had much changed.  Was he born in one of these residences?

 Or these ones?

Or was he born in a residence that had been torn down long ago and was now a parking lot, a park, or a garden?  They probably got their water from the well that's on the right in the photo collage below. 

 Hard to tell.

I really hadn't done much preparatory research before I came so I decided to find myself a coffee shop or pub with Wi-Fi Internet access and see if I could do some on-line access before I left Knaresborough.

Finding the So-Cafe, I quickly logged onto the FreeReg website and plugged in my search parameters - Yorkshire County, Knares..........   Whoa!  There was no Knaresborough Parish.  You see, the key to searching birth, baptismal, marriage, and death records are the Parish Records.  Over the years since the beginning of the Internet, volunteers have sat down in front of microfilm and transcribed the information into their laptops which has then been uploaded onto the FreeReg website.  Which makes searching these records kind of easy.

Except that nobody had gotten around to transcribing the BMD records for Knaresborough Parish.  I tried a search for all of Yorkshire County but no luck.

Not to be discouraged, I then went to my Ancestry.co.uk website and did some searches on the 1841, 1851, 1861 and 1871 census records.

Bingo!  Paydirt! 

Only problem was that Henry and his son Samuel had long moved from Knaresborough to other parts of Yorkshire.  So, me being in Knaresborough wasn't going to do me any good.  Still, it was a good visit as I wandered around the rest of the town and down to the river which is at the foot of the castle (How'd you like to be Oliver Cromwell's roundheads scaling those cliffs, eh!?  (I couldn't get a full shot of the cliffs but you get the idea.)

While it was an easy descent down the steps from the top of the hill to the bottom by the river, it was another story when it came to climbing back up those 177 steps to the train station.  To give you an idea of the ascent, here's a photo taken at water-level towards that beautiful cut-stone railway bridge across the River Nidd.  Near the top-right corner of the photo below, you can just see the upward angle of a brick wall.  The steps are behind that brick wall and there's a couple more flights of steps above the wall. 

So it was back to York and another tour of the National Railway Museum before supper.  Tomorrow we're trekking back to Sheringham and the last part of our voyage before we return back to Canada.