Place:Bourne, Lincolnshire, England

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source: Family History Library Catalog

the following text is based on an article in Wikipedia

Bourne is a market town and civil parish in the South Kesteven District of Lincolnshire. It is situated on the eastern edge of the Kesteven Uplands and the western border of the Lincolnshire Fens.

Bourne was part of Bourne Rural District from 1894 until 1899 when it was made an urban district. It has a current (21st century) population of just under 14,000.

History

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

The Ancient Woodland of Bourne Woods is still extant, although much reduced. It originally formed part of the ancient Forest of Kesteven and is now managed by the Forestry Commission.

The earliest documentary reference to Brunna, meaning stream, is from a document of 960, and the town appeared in Domesday Book of 1086 as Brune.^[1]

Bourne Abbey, (charter 1138), formerly held and maintained land in Bourne and other parishes. In later times this was known as the manor of Bourne Abbots. Whether the canons knew that name is less clear. The estate was given by the founder of the Abbey, Baldwin fitz Gilbert de Clare, son of Gilbert fitz Richard, and later benefactors. The abbey was established under the Arrouaisian order. Its fundamental rule was that of St Augustine and as time went on it came to be regarded as Augustinian. The Ormulum, an important Middle English Biblical gloss, was probably written in the abbey in around 1175.

Bourne Castle was built on land that is now the Wellhead Gardens in South Street.

Bourne was an important junction on the Victorian railway system, but all such connections were severed after the Second World War (see Railways section). The business stimulus it brought caused major development of the town and many of the buildings around the medieval street plan were rebuilt or at least refaced. Improved communications allowed a bottled-water industry to develop and coal to be delivered to the town's gas works.

The local authority at the time, Bourne Urban District Council, was active in the town's interests, taking over the gas works and the local watercress beds at times of financial difficulty and running them as commercial ventures. Large numbers of good-quality council houses were built in the early 20th century.

Bourne sent many men to both world wars but was otherwise not much affected. During the Second World War a German bomber shot down in May 1941 crashed into the Butcher's Arms public house in Eastgate. The landlord, his wife and eight soldiers billetted across the road were killed, as were the bomber's crew. In a separate incident several bombs were dropped on the Hereward Camp.

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.