Place:Allington, Lincolnshire, England

source: Family History Library Catalog

source: Family History Library Catalog

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

"ALLINGTON (East and West), two parishes in the district of Newark and county of Lincoln; 2¼ miles N of Sedgebrook [railway] station, and 4 NW of Grantham. They have a post office, of the name of Allington, under Grantham. Acres in both: 2,070. Real property: £3,535. Population of [East Allington]: 275. Houses: 64. Population of [West Allington]: 135. Houses: 27. The property is not much divided. Allington House is an edifice in the Tudor style. The livings are in the diocese of Lincoln; and that of [East Allington] is a curacy annexed to the rectory of Sedgebrook; while that of [West Allington] is a rectory, of the value of £262, in the patronage of the Lord Chancellor. The church is very good; and there are charities £17."

the following text is based on articles in Wikipedia and GENUKI

Allington is a village and civil parish in the South Kesteven District of Lincolnshire, England. It is situated 3 miles (5 km) northwest of Grantham on the Lincolnshire border with Leicestershire. The 2001 Census gave a population of 728 for the parish in 329 households.

Allington was formed from two settlements: East Allington and West Allington (both redirected here). East Allington was a chapelry in the ecclesiastical parish of Sedgebrook, and West Allington was an ecclesiastical or ancient parish. According to A Vision of Britain through Time, until 1872 the two parishes were separate although they were "jointly rated for poor law/civil purposes".

Allington's Grade II listed Anglican parish church was located in West Allington. It is of Norman origin and is dedicated to the Holy Trinity. East Allington's chapel of ease dedicated to St. James was torn down shortly after the two parishes merged in 1872. The graveyard still exists and a cross marks the site of the old church altar.

The poet George Crabbe (1754–1832) became the incumbent of Muston, Leicestershire and West Allington in 1789, remaining until 1792. His Natural History of the Vale of Belvoir was a pioneering study of the district. English Heritage gives the date of Crabbe's Allington incumbency as 1790 to 1814, but he was an absentee for most of the time following 1792.

Parish registers for both churches exist from 1559, but many East Allington baptisms and marriages appear in the Sedgebrook parish register. The Primitive Methodists had a small chapel in East Allington, built in 1858. Allington was in the Newark Registration District in Nottinghamshire from the beginning of civil registration until 1934. (Source:Newark Registration District list from UKBMD and GENUKI.)

GENUKI has more details about the Allington parishes than is given here.

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.