Place:Benington, Lincolnshire, England

NOTE: The name of this parish is Benington, not Bennington.

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Benington is a village and civil parish in the Borough of Boston in Lincolnshire, England, and approximately east of Boston, and on the A52 road. The parish contains the hamlets of Benington Sea End and West End. Nearby villages are Butterwick and Leverton.

Benington parish has a population of 569, increasing to 580 at the 2011 Census. It is one of eighteen parishes which, together with Boston, form the borough. Local government has been arranged in this way since the reorganisation of 1 April 1974, which resulted from the Local Government Act 1972. The parish forms part of the Coastal electoral ward. Hitherto, the parish had formed part of Boston Rural District, in the Parts of Holland. Holland was one of the three divisions (formally known as parts) of the traditional county of Lincolnshire. Since the Local Government Act of 1888, Holland had been in most respects, a county in itself.

The name derives from Old English meaning "Bennas farm or settlement".

The parish church is a Grade I listed building dedicated to All Saints and dating from the 13th to 15th centuries, although it was restored in 1873 by James Fowler of Louth. It has a 14th-century font. It closed as a church in 2003 (with its last service in 2001) and was boarded up. In 2015, the Benington Community Heritage Trust received a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, and as at early 2021 it is being refurbished for use as a community centre "The Beonna at All Saints" (named after Beonna, an eighth century king of East Anglia).

Purril's Almshouses date from the 15th century, although rebuilt in 1728, and are Grade II listed.

The distance omitted in the excerpt from Wikipedia is "approximately 4 miles (6 km) east of the town of Boston."

Research Tips for the Boston, Lincolnshire, Area

From 1889 until 1974 Lincolnshire was divided into three administrative counties: Parts of Holland (in the southeast), Parts of Kesteven and Parts of Lindsey (further north and/or west). These formal names do not fit with modern grammatical usage, but that is what they were named, nonetheless.

The southern part of Lincolnshire, particularly the Parts of Holland, is very low-lying and land had to be drained for agriculture to be successful. These areas are named "The Fens".

Fenland is a feature of the Boston Rural District and Horncastle Rural District areas. Fenlands tended to be extraparochial until the mid 1850s, but were then identified with names and given the title "civil parish". Many were abolished in 1906, and became parts of larger neighbouring parishes. As a result, Wikipedia no longer provides articles on some of these small low-populated areas.

Sources

• OS New Popular One-Inch Map, Sheet 114, provided online by A Vision of Britain, is an early 20th century map covering the east part of Lincolnshire from Boston to Skegness. It does not list all the fen settlements, but does list all the towns and hamlets. Degrees of longitude and latitude are given along its sides. The map magnifies to a very high scale.

• Normally, A Vision of Britain would also be suggested as a source for parish boundary maps for the area. Unfortunately, this website has made an error in its map indexing and the sub-heading "Boundary Maps" repeats the maps given under "Topographic Maps". It is not possible to view outlines of the parishes located in this area.

• The National Library of Scotland [1] [1] also provides a large number of maps for all the counties and districts of England as well as those of Scotland. Their map indices for England only cover modern placenames, but they do allow the user to view a parish in relation to its neighbours. These maps are very easy to read.

• FindMyPast, a pay website, now has a large collection of Lincolnshire baptisms, banns, marriages and burials now available to search by name, year, place and parent's names.

• GENUKI's page on Lincolnshire's Archive Service gives addresses, phone numbers, webpages for all archive offices, museums and libraries in Lincolnshire which may store old records and also presents a list entitled "Hints for the new researcher" which may include details of which you are not aware. These suggestions are becoming more and more outdated.

• GENUKI also has pages of information on individual parishes, particularly ecclesiastical parishes. The author may just come up with morsels of information not supplied in other internet-available sources.

• Deceased Online, a pay website, now has records for 11 cemeteries and two crematoria in Lincolnshire. This includes Grimsby's Scartho Road cemetery, Scartho Road crematorium, and Cleethorpes cemetery, council records for the City of Lincoln and Gainsborough, and church records from the UK's National Archives for St Michael's in Stamford, and St Mark's in Lincoln, dating back to 1707.