Place:Folkingham, Lincolnshire, England

NOTE: Wikipedia has a very long article on Folkingham. The six earlier sections, which are not of such interest to the family historian, have been omitted here.

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

Folkingham is a village and civil parish on the northern edge of the South Kesteven district of Lincolnshire, England. It lies on the A15 road north of Bourne. The civil parish and ecclesiastical parish have the same boundaries. The 2001 Census recorded a population of 729,^[1] which increased to 796 at the 2011 census.

The distances omitted in the excerpt from Wikipedia are "11 miles (18 km) north of Bourne and 10 miles (16 km) south of Sleaford".

Post-Reformation

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

Into the Georgian Age

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

Heathcote's Town

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

NOTE: Threekingham is in the North Kesteven District.

Notable Buildings

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

The House of Correction

In the early 19th century Folkingham was part of Quarter Sessions, the higher court that dispensed justice for the area, which explains why a House of Correction, or minor prison, was built. It was constructed on the site of Folkingham Castle.^[2] The surviving Grade II* listed buildings consist of the original 19th-century governor's house and gateway, dating from 1808 and 1825. It was closed in 1878 but was taken over in about 1980 by the Landmark Trust, who converted the Gateway into a holiday home.

The Greyhound

The Greyhound, once a coaching inn, dates back to 1650. It has since been converted into flats. It is a Grade II*listed building.

Parish church

The Church of England parish church of Saint Andrew originates from the late 12th century and was largely completed by the late 15th, with restorations carried out in 1825, 1858 and 1860. It has early Decorated Gothic arcades and a mainly Early English chancel, with a Norman pier where there was an opening into a chantry chapel. On the south side of the church are the remains of stocks and a whipping-post. The church is a Grade I listed building.^[3]

The church is a prominent feature of the village, but is inconspicuous from the Market Place. In 2006 it was damaged when gale force winds blew down two of the four pinnacles, one of which fell onto the roof causing damaging costing more than £100,000 to repair. Folkingham parish is part of the South Lafford Group of parishes in the Lafford Deanery, Diocese of Lincoln.

Folkingham Manor

Folkingham Manor House is located just off the Market place and is located in the centre of Folkingham. It was built for Lord Clinton in the 17th century and was constructed of stone taken from the castle

Research Tips

• 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 (The best for WeRelate purposes, but the parish names are very hard to read.)
• Lincolnshire Ordnance Survey Map, revised 1937 with later Rural District divisions

• The National Library of Scotland [1] also provides a large number of maps for all the counties and districts of England as well as those of Scotland. Their maps of 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 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 of information 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.

The south of 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 (in the southeast), Parts of Kesteven (in the southwest) and Parts of Lindsey (in the north of the county). 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.