The Quakers in Airton

The Friends Meeting House, Airton

The Scalehouse Meeting near Rylstone had been founded by 1669 as part of the Settle Monthly Meeting. It was renamed Airton Meeting in 17th or 18th century and then later transferred to Brighouse Monthly Meeting in 1853.
The Society of Friends Meeting House at Airton was built by William Ellis (1658-1709) a local linen weaver and his wife Alice. They purchased the site of the Meeting House in 1697 and completed the building in 1700. The Airton meeting house is still in use and an appeal to restore the building was launched in 2007 and you can read a Brief History of the Airton Meeting House which was published at the time. You can also find out more about William and Alice in the book by James Backhouse called: The Life and Correspondence of William and Alice Ellis first published in 1846 and available free at GoogleBooks.

Airton Quaker Records :

The National Archives hold the Register of Births belonging to the Monthly Meeting of Rylstone & Airton 1592-1790, which contains a Register of Marriages 1661-1777 and a Register of Burials 1660-1790 under the reference RG6/1509. From 1795 the Birth and Burial records can be found in the Settle records under RG6/891 & RG6/1116. All these are now available online on The National Archives partner website BMDregisters.

Burials at Airton Quaker Meeting House (1669-2003) is a list we have compiled from a variety of sources including monumental inscriptions found in the burial ground at Airton (Memorial stones were only permitted from the late 19th century), records in the Brotherton Library at Leeds University, the Register of Deaths & Burials of the Society of Friends in the Craven area 1757-1837, published 1997, by Keighley Family History Publishing and available from the Quaker Family History Society and the National Archives records RG6/1509 & RG6/892 which are available to view online at BMDregisters and TheGenealogist.

We also have a survey of the Airton Burial Ground Monumental Inscriptions, complete with photographs of the headstones and a plan of the layout and the texzt from a booklet on the History of the Airton Meeting House.

The Brotherton Library, Leeds University, holds the Carlton Hill Archive of Quaker records, part of their special collections, which include Burial notes 1882-96 and the Airton & Rilstone Women's Meeting minute book 1699-1777.

The Leeds University website includes a searchable online index containing nearly 40,000 records, most of them indexing the names of those individual Quakers who are recorded in minute books of West and North Yorkshire Meetings of the Society of Friends, dating from the late 17th to the early 20th century. These include some records for Airton and below is a list of names mentioned in Airton Meeting documents extracted from this index. The full entry can be found by using their database, but this provides little more than page references to archival documents, and is essentially a finding aid for use alongside the Carlton Hill archive at the Leeds University Library.

Yorkshire Quaker Heritage Project : Based at the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull, also maintains a location register for Yorkshire Friends' records and they have a Name index of individuals mentioned in the East Riding Monthly Meeting minute books.
They also offer a very useful and extensive downloadable guide: Researching Yorkshire Quaker History: A Guide to Sources

The Quaker Family History Society website contains a useful page describing the various kinds of record you can find.