Place:Wroot, North Lincolnshire, Lincolnshire, England

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

Wroot (pronounced ) is a linear village and civil parish in North Lincolnshire, England, south of the River Torne on the Isle of Axholme, close to the boundary with South Yorkshire. The population at the 2011 census was 455.

History

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

The name Wroot is derived from wrot, Old English for snout, probably in reference to a spur of land. Mills confirms the view, also stating that in 1157 Wroot was "Wroth".

<poem> Fortune has fixed thee in a place Debarred of wisdom, wit, and grace – High births and virtue equally they scorn, As asses dull, on dunghills born ; Impervious as the stones their heads are found ; Their rage and hatred steadfast as the ground. With these unpolished wights, thy youthful days Glide slow and dull, and Nature's lamp decays : Oh what a lamp is hid 'midst such a sordid race !'</poem>

By 1826 houses in the parish numbered no more than 54 with a population of 285.^[1]

In 1885 Kelly's Directory recorded an 1881 population of 356 in a parish area of , in which the chief crops grown were wheat and potatoes. One of the principal landowners was the Hatfield Chase Corporation. There were eighteen farmers, a wheelwright, shopkeeper, blacksmith, shoemaker, grocer, and a collector of rates. The grocer was also a provision and tea dealer and confectioner. An omnibus linked the village to Doncaster market weekly. There was a Primitive Methodist and a Wesleyan chapel, a post office, and a public house, the Cross Keys. The parish church of St Pancras, rebuilt in 1879 on the site of an earlier church, held 100 people. The village school, which held about 100 children, was also built in 1879 on the site of a former Free School, founded and endowed in 1706 by Henry Travis.

Henry Travis of London provided in his will endowments for the establishment of three schools, one each in Hatfield, Thorne and Wroot parishes, to provide instruction in English, Church catechism and Christian religious principles. Children were to be selected for the schools by parish parsons and churchwardens. The endowment was administered by nine trustees, and a schoolmaster was to be employed for between eighty and ninety pounds per year.

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.