Do you have any Lincolnshire ancestors? Well, if you do the
LincsToThePast website is the place to go for parish and local records and what is great is that it's FREE to use.
I have used this website a lot as my Presswood family have lived within the same area of Lincolnshire for 200 years.
Unfortunately not all the parish records are available to view online and they are not transcribed but most of the parishes of Lincolnshire are small and rural so if you know which parish your ancestors resided in and the approximate year of their birth, death or marriage, then you can quite easily browse the images to find them.
When using the site to look for great, great, great, great grandfather, William Presswood's burial record in the parish of Stow-in-Lindsey I found out something really interesting...
...so I am going to run through how I found his record on the site.
Firstly, I had established an approximate date of death of c1841-3 for William from researching the family on the censuses and birth, marriage and death indexes. In 1841 the family was living in a hamlet called Bransby, Lincolnshire in the parish of Sturton by Stow or Stow in Lindsey.
On the website I searched "Stow in Lindsey burials"...
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| Lincs To The Past search (Link) |
...which turns up the results below...
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| Search results (Link) |
The results show all the records relating to the parish of Stow in Lindsey and burials, as you can see the records are split into books for certain years but not all record books are always available online, if there is an image next to the record description it means the images for that record set are available to be viewed online.
Click the book you want to look at and then browse...
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| Browsing the document (Link) |
You can look through page by page, or jump a few pages on to find the date range you're looking for and use the toolbar to zoom the image.
1841 is found on page 29 where my ancestors burial is recorded...
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| My ancestors death record in the parish burial records for Stow in Lindsey Parish, Lincolnshire (Link) |
Thanks to the curate who recorded his burial for he has added extra notes which inform me that William Prestwood (notice difference in name spelling) of Bransby "hanged himself, verdict of the Coroner's inquest, Being of unsound mind", which opens up more avenues of research...but more to come about William and his family in
The Presswood Story.
At the bottom of the page you will notice that if you register with the website that you can tag or transcribe the documents, which means that you can find people easier next time by just searching a name to see which records are flagged up.
I find it is not always the best or easiest website to use for viewing images but I have spent many a happy hour browsing possible parish records for my ancestors and even transcribed a few. The website contains many different records related to Lincolnshire so depending on what you are looking for, you might find other records of interest to you and your research.
Copyright
© 2013 Ruth Hogan
