Place:Great Carlton, Lincolnshire, England

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

Great Carlton is a village and civil parish in the East Lindsey district of Lincolnshire, England. The population of the civil parish at the 2011 census was 136. It is situated southeast from the market town of Louth, Lincolnshire.

Great Carlton is listed in the 1086 Domesday Book as "Magna Carleton". The name Carlton derives from the Old English 'Ceorlatun' meaning "the village of the free peasants", from the word 'ceorl' meaning "free peasant". There was a market granted to Great Carlton in 1275.

The parish church is dedicated to Saint John the Baptist, and was largely rebuilt in 1861 by James Fowler in 13th-century style, although it retains its 15th-century Perpendicular tower. It is a Grade II listed building.

A notable land owner and freeman of Great Carlton was George Smith, father of Captain John Smith (1580–1631); the same John Smith who acquired great fame as President of the Virginia Company at Jamestown in North America. John Smith was likely born in this village on his father's farm, but his parents (mother Alice Rickard) had to travel south to St. Helena's Parish Church in Willoughby by Alford for his infant baptism on Saturday, 9 Jan 1580. George leased other property from Lord Willoughby de Eresby. Alice Rickard Smith descended from the Rickards of Great Heck, South Yorkshire.

The Grade II listed church lychgate dates from 1871 and was erected by Canon Pretyman.

Great Carlton Church of England School was founded in 1716 as Great Carlton Free School. It later became a National School, and by 1906 it was known as Great Carlton School. It closed in the summer of 1976.

Great Carlton is situated 5 miles (8.0 km) southeast of the market town of Louth.

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.