Place:Grimsby District, Humberside, England

the following text is based on the "Government" section of an article in Wikipedia

Governance

Until the 19th century Great Grimsby was an "ancient borough" in the North Riding of Lindsey. (See Lincolnshire for a discussion of Lincolnshire Ridings.) It was reformed by the Municipal Corporations Act 1835 and became a Municipal Borough in that year. In 1889 a County Council was created for Lindsey, but Great Grimsby was outside its area of control and formed an independent County Borough in 1891. The Borough expanded to absorb the adjacent hamlet of Wellow and the neighbouring parish of Clee-with-Weelsby in 1889, the parishes of Little Coates, Scartho, and Weelsby in 1928 and Great Coates in 1968. These places had previously been part of the Grimsby Rural District.

In 1974, the County Borough of Grimsby was abolished and Great Grimsby was reconstituted (with the same boundaries) and renamed the Grimsby non-metropolitan district in the new county of Humberside by the Local Government Act 1972. The district was renamed Great Grimsby in 1979.

Local government in the area came under the review of the Local Government Commission for England and Humberside was abolished in 1996. The former area of the Great Grimsby district merged with that of Cleethorpes to form the unitary authority of North East Lincolnshire. North East Lincolnshire is considered to be in the ceremonial county of Lincolnshire.

Great Grimsby as a Borough of Humberside

Area in 1911: 2,868 acres (11.61 km2) Area in 1961: 5,881 acres (23.80 km2)

History

• Created 1835
• Status

• Town (Charter granted 1201)
• Municipal Borough (1835–1889)
• County Borough (1889–1974)
• Borough (1974–1996)
• Abolished 1996
• Succeeded by North East Lincolnshire

Economy

The main sectors of the Grimsby economy are ports and logistics; food processing, specifically frozen foods and fish processing. To the east Cleethorpes has a tourist industry, and to the west, along the Humber bank to Immingham is large scale industrial activity, established from the 1950s onwards, focused on chemicals, and more recently (1990s) gas power electrical generation.

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.