Place:Middle Rasen, Lincolnshire, England

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

Middle Rasen is a village and civil parish in the West Lindsey district of Lincolnshire, England, located about west from the town of Market Rasen. The population of the civil parish at the 2011 census was 2,043.

The parish is located about 1.5 miles (2.4 km) west from the town of Market Rasen.

History

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

Rasen is mentioned in Domesday Book of 1086, but West Rasen, Middle Rasen and Market Rasen are indistinguishable. In its entirety the list includes ten separate references to Rasen, which as a whole consists of 144 households.^[1]

Today's village results from the merger of the two historic villages of Middle Rasen Drax and Middle Rasen Tupholme.

Middle Rasen has had two churches. A church dedicated to St Paul Middle Rasen Drax took part of its name from the parent house of Drax Priory in Yorkshire. In 1846 St Paul's comprised a nave, chancel, South aisle and western tower, with the probable remains of a demolished north aisle and north chapel. – it was demolished in 1860, with parts of its fabric used to restore of the church of St Peter. Grade II* listed St Peter's church dates from the 12th century, with later alterations and additions, and an 1861 restoration by Pearson Bellamy and John Spence Hardy, of Lincoln.^[2]

In 1885 Kelly's Directory noted village Wesleyan, Primitive Methodist, and Reformed Wesleyan chapels. It described a parish land of sand and clay, with a clay subsoil, on which wheat, barley and turnips were grown, and with pasture. Parish area was , supporting an 1881 population of 928. There were 17 farmers listed, four of whom had added trades, variously a miller, cattle dealer, butcher & cattle dealer, and machine owner. Other occupations were a blacksmith, beer retailer & blacksmith, millwright, grocer, shopkeeper, wheelwright, carrier, grocer & draper, butcher & cattle dealer, miller, publican, and dressmaker, and a shoemaker who also ran the post office.^[3]

A tower windmill, built in 1827 for the grinding of cereal, ceased working permanently in 1925, and is now used as a store. A previous three storey red-brick watermill dated from the late 18th century, with 1827 remodelling – its remaining wheelhouse is Grade II listed.^[1]

Middle Rasen Primary School was built in 1875 to replace a charity school founded through a bequest by John Wilkinson, who died in 1720. In 1878 the school became a Board School, and in 1903 the Middle Rasen Council School. The charity still supports the current school.^[1][3]

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.