The Gledhills arrived in Berry Brow, Almondbury parish, in the 1680s, when the area was relatively recently settled. attracted by the small-scale coal-mining opportunities available in the area. By the mid eighteenth century they had turned, like the majority of the population, to textiles. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Berry Brow became very densely populated with many dwellings crammed into a relatively small area of steep hillside.
Many of the families living there intermarried over several generations, hence the fact that Merchant Gledhill, born in 1840, had a Gledhill paternal grandfather and a Gledhill maternal grandmother.
Therefore there are two reports below, A and B, one for each of these lines.
In the 1881 census for Back Lane, Berry Brow, there are 27 Gledhills living in that one street. Berry Brow was almost entirely demolished in 1967, scattering a tight-knit community that had developed over 300 years.
.
