Dear all, When I set up the Genuki Yorkshire pages (1995) I thought long and hard about how to arrange things. My options were: 1. Set up by Ridings and the parishes that existed immediately before 1974. 2. Set up by Ridings and the Ancient parishes (pre compulsory civil registration) 3. Set up using the "plastic" counties of the post 1974 Yorkshire. 4. Set up using the registration districts. I decided to take option 2 and follow the ecclesiastical parishes pre 1830s when civil registration came in. My main reason for doing this is that most people can trace their ancestry back to the 1830s and then have problems due to not knowing which parish register a birth/death/marriage would be registered in. Setting up the parishes on Genuki and including all the places within the ancient parishes (which were reasonably stable for some 300 years before 1830) allows people to find the likely parish church (or chapel or ease) their ancestors would have used to register their B, D, or M in. Setting up the Genuki pages using the civil parishes would just have created confusion as not only did the borders of civil parishes change frequently, but there were none before the 1830s - have a look and see how the registration districts have changed over the past 100 years. Using the current counties of Yorkshire would have created confusion too, as for instance Great Mitton parish is now in Lancashire and Romaldkirk parish is now in County Durham and so someone finding their ancestors came from Romaldkirk would have gone to Genuki and found that there was no Romaldkirk in the Yorkshire pages. The current "East Riding of Yorkshire" is not the same area as the old East Riding, but the name was chosen in order to get rid of the hated "North Humberside" name. This was particularly hated by the people in the northern part of North Humberside for instance Bridlington which is some 30 miles from the Humber (you could just about drop the whole of Bedfordshire in the gap between the two). So, my recommendation is to use the ancient (ecclesiastical) parishes to place your ancestors as they have known fixed boundaries. Please don't confuse civil parishes or postal addresses (for instance, Great Smeaton, Northallerton) with ecclesiastical parishes. Hope this helps, Best wishes, Colin Hinson. In the village of Blunham in Bedfordshire U.K. Webmaster for the Genuki Yorkshire pages: http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/YKS/ The Yorkshire Surnames interest list: http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/YKS/YKSlist/ Old and Rare Yorkshire Books on searchable CDroms: http://www.YorkshireCDbooks.com