Place:Caistor Rural, Lindsey, England

the following text is based on an article in Wikipedia

Caistor was a rural district in Lincolnshire, Parts of Lindsey from 1894 to 1974. It was formed by the Local Government Act 1894 from Caistor Rural Sanitary District. It entirely surrounded, but did not include, the town of Market Rasen which was an urban district. It is to the north of Welton Rural District and to the east of Gainsborough Rural District.

The three rural districts listed above were abolished in 1974 under the Local Government Act 1972, becoming part of the West Lindsey District, along with the urban districts of Market Rasen and Gainsborough.

Situated in the north of Lincolnshire in the Lindsey Division, the Rural District of Caistor extended to 119,092 acres and comprised 40 civil parishes. From its most northerly parish of Brocklesby, near the Humber, to Lissington in the extreme south is a distance of about 20 miles. From Swinhope in the east of the District to Waddingham in the west is about 16 miles. Market Rasen was a separate Urban District within that area. The characteristic physical features of this District are the Wolds on the east which rise to 548 feet above sea-level at Normanby le Wold, this being the highest elevation in the whole of Lincolnshire. The western parishes comprised fertile, low-lying lands along the valley of the River Ancholme, a tributary of the Humber.

For maps of the area, see the series listed in Research Tips below.

For more information, see the EN Wikipedia article Caistor Rural District.

Parishes

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.