Place:Butterwick, Lincolnshire, England

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

Butterwick is a village and civil parish in the Borough of Boston, Lincolnshire, England, It is situated approximately east from the market town of Boston.

Butterwick is one of eighteen civil parishes which, together with Boston, form the Borough of Boston local government arrangement, in place since a 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 1888 Local Government Act Holland had been, in most respects, a county in itself.

On the nearby coast, Freiston Shore, is a wildlife reserve covering approximately of brackish lagoon, and a natural and reconstituted salt marsh.

The name comes from the Old English "butere" and "wic" meaning a meeting place, or a butter specialised farm.

Butterwick Grade I listed Anglican church is dedicated to St Andrew. It contains Early English style arcades and font. In 1916 Cox reported that an ancient sycamore, planted in 1653, stood in the churchyard.

Ordnance survey maps from the 1920s show an agricultural tramway network running west from the village in a u-shape to Butterwick Grange. Such tramways often used WW1 narrow gauge trench railway equipment to allow year around access to soft fenland fields.

Butterwick Mill, a Grade II listed tower mill built in 1871, has been partially restored by Lincolnshire County Council.

The village also has a public house (The Five Bells), a Church of England primary school, fish and chip shop, park, and small businesses.

The distance omitted in the excerpt from Wikipedia is "approximately 3 miles (5 km) east from the market 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.