Did the Football League start in Penistone?

Recent research into the origins of the Football League can be found in Dransfield’s personal notebooks held in the archive.

The full four pages of JN Dransfield’s minute script are well worth a close study once you can get your eyes used to his handwriting.

Detailed close-up photographs of the 1100-plus pages of the very fragile ledger are available to view at the archives in the St. John’s Community Centre.

From Brian Parkhurst: “After a couple of months of working on this… you can probably do a better job (by eye) than Spellcheck at reading his hand. The main problem is how he moves from English to Latin and Greek mixed with Yorkshire in the same sentence at times! In one line he can be discussing the role of the Salvation Army in Japan and a medieval recipe for roast swan in the next with minimal punctuation…