Place:Spittlegate, Lincolnshire, England

source: Family History Library Catalog

A Vision of Britain through Time provides the following description of Spittlegate from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1870-72:

"SPITTLEGATE, Houghton, and Walton, a township in Grantham parish, Lincoln; adjacent to Grantham. Real property: £11,520. Population in 1851: 3,084; in 1861: 3,803. Houses: 798. The Grantham workhouse and extensive foundries are here. See Grantham."

Spittlegate was a township and then a civil parish on the southern border of the town of Grantham, Lincolnshire, from 1866 until 1894 when it was split into two civil parishes: Spittlegate Within and Spittlegate Without. Spittlegate Within is normally listed as Spitalgate, covers about 580 acres and includes most of the area created for the ecclesiastical parish in 1842. It included the R. Hornsby and Sons, Ltd., founded in 1815, one of the largest manufacturers of agricultural machinery and implements. It also included the Perserverance Iron Works, a brewery, a corn mill and brickyard. Spittlegate Without lay beyond the municipality and covered about 1,680 acres. (Source: GENUKI)

The Anglican parish church is dedicated to St. John the Evangelist and the registers start with the dedication of the church in 1842. The Wesleyan Methodists had a chapel on Commercial Road (originally on Bridge End road, erected 1875). (Source: GENUKI)

RAF Spitalgate, formerly known as RFC Station Grantham and RAF Station Grantham, was a Royal Flying Corps and Royal Air Force station, located 2 mi (3.2 km) south east of the centre of Grantham, Lincolnshire, England fronting onto the main A52 road. The station opened in 1915 as Royal Flying Corps Station Grantham, becoming RAF Station Grantham on 1 April 1918 - a name it bore until 1942 when it was renamed as RAF Station Spitalgate. RAF Station Spitalgate continued as a Royal Air Force base with various specialities until 1975. (Source: Wikipedia)

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.