Place:Blyton cum Wharton, Lincolnshire, England

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

source: Family History Library Catalog

the following text is based on an article in Wikipedia

Blyton cum Wharton or Blyton with Wharton, and commonly described simply as Blyton even in the 19th century, was an ancient parish and a civil parish that existed in the Lindsey portion of Lincolnshire until 1936. The parish included the small hamlet of Wharton. A description from circa 1870 appears below. In 1936 the civil parish was combined with an extraparochial tract to the northwest named Greenhill and Redhill and formed into a new civil parish which was named Blyton.

The Anglican Church is dedicated to Saint Martin and parish register entries start in 1571. Wesleyan Methodists had a chapel built here in 1822. There was a Primitive Methodist chapel here in 1832 with a new one built in 1851 and operating after 1913. (Source: [http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/LIN/Blyton/ GENUKI)

A Vision of Britain through Time provides the following description of Blyton from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1870-72:

"BLYTON, a village and a parish in Gainsborough [registration] district, Lincoln. The village stands near the Manchester and Lincolnshire railway, 4½ miles NE of Gainsborough; and has a station on the railway, and a post office under Gainsborough. The parish includes also the hamlet of Wharton. Acres: 2,830. Real property: £6,719. Population: 746. Houses: 171. The property is divided among a few. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Lincoln. Value: £399. Patron: the Earl of Scarborough. The church is good; and there are two Methodist chapels, and a school with £20 of endowed income."

Research Tips

Lincolnshire is very low-lying and land had to be drained for agriculture to be successful. The larger drainage channels, many of which are parallel to each other, became boundaries between parishes. Many parishes are long and thin for this reason.

There is much fenland in Lincolnshire, particularly in the Boston and Horncastle areas. Fenlands tended to be extraparochial before the mid 1850s, and although many sections were identified with names and given the title "civil parish", little information has been found about them. Many appear to be abolished in 1906, but the parish which adopts them is not given in A Vision of Britain through Time. Note the WR category Lincolnshire Fenland Settlements which is an attempt to organize them into one list.

From 1889 until 1974 Lincolnshire was divided into three administrative counties: Parts of Holland, Parts of Kesteven and Parts of Lindsey. These formal names do not fit with modern grammatical usage, but that is what they were, nonetheless. In 1974 the northern section of Lindsey, along with the East Riding of Yorkshire, became the short-lived county of Humberside. In 1996 Humberside was abolished and the area previously in Lincolnshire was made into the two "unitary authorities" of North Lincolnshire and North East Lincolnshire. The remainder of Lincolnshire was divided into "non-metropolitan districts" or "district municipalities" in 1974. Towns, villages and parishes are all listed under Lincolnshire, but the present-day districts are also given so that places in this large county can more easily be located and linked to their wider neighbourhoods. See the WR placepage Lincolnshire, England and the smaller divisions for further explanation.

• Maps provided online by A Vision of Britain through Time show all the parishes and many villages and hamlets. (Small local reorganization of parishes took place in the 1930s led to differences between the latter two maps.):

• Lincolnshire Ordnance Survey Map of 1888 with Poor Law Union divisions
• Lincolnshire Ordnance Survey Map of 1900 with early Rural District divisions
• Lincolnshire Ordnance Survey Map, revised 1937 with later Rural District divisions

• FindMyPast now has a large collection of Lincolnshire baptisms, banns, marriages and burials now available to search by name, year, place and parent's names. This is a pay website. (blog dated 16 Sep 2016)
• 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, but there's no telling what may be expected in a small library.
• GENUKI also has pages of information on individual parishes, particularly ecclesiastical parishes. The author may just come up with morsels not supplied in other internet-available sources.
• Deceased Online 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 older church records from The National Archives for St Michael's in Stamford, and St Mark's in Lincoln, dating back to 1707. This is a pay website.