© 2016 David E. Spencer
Author's note The Buckroyd name is not especially common, even in the Leeds area of Yorkshire from whence it seems to originate. I have been in contact with several other "Buckroyd searchers" and most, if not all of us, agree that is definitely a Leeds name and that in all probability the Buckroyds are a single family with various branches.
A look at the Latter Day Saints' "Familysearch.org" website reveals that Buckroyds have been baptised and married at St. Peter's Church in Leeds (it is the ancient parish church for Leeds) since the 17th century. The problem is to work out accurate lineages for the various Buckroyds there. This is rapidly nearing the top of my "to do" list for family history!.
An important development that I discovered during the winter of 2012/3 is the inclusion in the records available online at ancestry.co.uk of West Yorkshire parish records including those for St. Peter's at Leeds. These are scans of the original parish records so many more details are present than in IGI entries.
The most distant Buckroyd ancestor that we have been able to trace was William Buckroyd, a cloth dresser from Leeds who died in 1839 aged 56. This gives us an approximate year of birth of 1783. He is included in the 1834 edition of Banks and Newsome's "General and Commercial Directory of Leeds" as a cloth dresser of 76 Park Lane in Leeds. William's place of death is given as Park Lane on his death certificate. Then as now Park Lane runs West from Leeds Town Hall, although in William's day there was no A58(M) to interrupt it!. William had married Mary Ann Forbes on the 10th November 1814 at St. Peter's Church. Leeds.
In the 1841 Census William's children are still living at Park Lane. They are James (born 1816, a cloth dresser), Maria (born 1819), Jane (born 1821), George (born 1825), James (born 1828), William (born 1828), Sara Anne (born 1832), Frederick (born 1833) and Mary Elizabeth (born 1836). The 1841 census (infuriatingly at times) simply asked if the people had been born in the same county in which they were living in 1841. We know all the Buckroyd children were born in Yorkshire. We have found descendants for four of these Buckroyd brothers and sisters
Maria married William Marhall Burton, a woolen cloth finisher from Armley, Leeds in 1843 at St. Peter's Church in Leeds. William was born in 1819 and died before the 1891 census. They had five children.
George was born in 1825. He married Mary Ann Eliza Burton (1825 - 82) in 1851 at St. Andrew's Church in Leeds. He worked as a warehouseman but by 1861 he had a grocer's shop on Reuben Steet in Little London (an area to the North West of the city centre between Meanwood Road and Woodhouse Lane). They had four children. Click here to read about the family of George and Mary Buckroyd.
James born about 1828 was a cloth dresser. He married Rosabel Young in 1857 at the church of St. Stephen in Kirkstall.
Mary Elizabeth born in 1836 married William Hampshire in 1858 at St. Peter , Leeds.