Place:Humberston, Lincolnshire, England

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

Humberston is a village and civil parish south of Cleethorpes in North East Lincolnshire, England.

Boundary and population

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

The village's boundary with Cleethorpes runs along North Sea Lane and Humberston Road. Its population in the 2001 census was 5,384, increasing to 5,634 at the 2011 Census. The Prime Meridian runs east of Humberston, through the Thorpe Park caravan site.

History

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

The Danes landed at the site of the village in 870. Humberston (or Humberstone, as the village was first known) takes its name from a large boulder, the "Humber Stone", which was deposited on the site of the former Midfield Farm during the last Ice Age. The boulder may be seen at the entrance to the village library, near St Peter's Church. The boulder at the entrance to the former library was discovered in the winter of 1956/7 while deep ploughing was taking place on the big field at Midfield Farm. two years later it was moved to Wendover Paddock in the village, and when the new library was built it was moved there. There is no evidence whatsoever that this is the actual stone from which the village gets its name, but it was described by Professor H H Swinnerton and Sir William Pugh of Hull University as a glacial boulder of Scottish origin of the type from which the village may have got its name. The "e" at the end of the name was later dropped to avoid confusion with a place with the same name.

The oldest (and tallest) building in Humberston is St Peter's Church. Although the church was rebuilt about 1710, the tower is over seven hundred years old. At the rear of the church is the site of the former Humberston Abbey of Benedictine monks, which was founded during the reign of Henry II and dedicated to Saints Mary and Peter. Although nearly all that remains is the monks' mound in the manor-house garden, stone sarcophagi have been excavated. The Wesleyan Methodists built a small chapel on Humberston Avenue in 1835, and a larger replacement chapel was built in 1907. An early wireless station was built in 1910.

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.

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 (southernmost), Parts of Kesteven and Parts of Lindsey (northernmost). 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.