Place:Hatcliffe, Lincolnshire, England

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

Hatcliffe is a small village and civil parish in rural North East Lincolnshire, England. It is situated south-west from Grimsby and west from the A18. Less than to the north is the neighbouring village of Beelsby.

Hatcliffe sits in the Lincolnshire Wolds, an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

History

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

In A Dictionary of British Place-Names, A.D. Mills suggests the etymology of Hatcliffe to reflect a personal name and a geographic feature to mean 'the cliff or bank of a man called Hadda'.

In the 11th century Domesday Book Hatcliffe's population of 9 smallholders and 9 freemen, in 18 households, was considered a 'medium' sized village. The lord of the manor in 1066 was Ralph the Staller (or 'Ralp the Constable') and, in 1086, the lord and tenant-in-chief was Alan Rufus.^[1]

The manor was long held by the family who bore the Hatcliffe name, including William Hatcliffe who served Henry VI of England and Edward IV of England, as court physician in the 15th century. In the late 1500s, Thomas Hatcliffe, was a Member of Parliament for Grimsby. He was rumoured to be cursed for rebuilding his new manor house in the village from the stones of a demolished church. In the 1960s, American academic John Leslie Hotson, then at Yale University, published his theory that Thomas's son, William Hatcliffe, was the 'Mr W.H.' to whom William Shakespeare dedicated his sonnets in 1609.^[2]

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.