Lincolnshire Online
BEST WEBSITES TO AID YOUR RESEARCH
The most useful website for researchers is www. lincstothepast.com. Its most popular offering for family historians is its free images of all the parish registers held by Lincolnshire Archives, but the parish registers are currently browse only. The site is not particularly easy to use so subscribers to Findmypast may prefer to go there ( findmypast. co.uk/articles/world-records/search-all-ukrecords/special- collections/the-lincolnshirecollection) where they will find the same images (also currently browse only). If using Lincs to the Past, it is worth going to the Help page and looking at the search guide on how to view parish registers. To help locate the right register, use freereg.org.uk which has a large collection of Lincolnshire parish register transcriptions.
For directories, try the University of Leicester’s Special Collections Online ( specialcollections. le.ac.uk), which offers free access to digitised directories from the 1760s to 1910s from all over England and Wales.
The FamilySearch wiki has a list of county parishes (familysearch.org/wiki/en/ Lincolnshire_ Parishes). Clicking on a parish name will lead to information about the locations of various sources, plus useful details such as the name of the presiding poor law union.
Subscription websites with some Lincolnshire parish information include thegenealogist. co.uk and ancestry.co.uk, while findmypast. co.uk as well as the parish register images from Lincolnshire Archives have a number of indexes supplied by Lincolnshire FHS including cemetery records, marriage bonds and Poor Law records ( findmypast.co.uk/articles/federationof-family-history-societies-members/ lincolnshire-family-history-society).
It’s worth searching North East Lincolnshire Archives ‘Online Archives Catalogue’ ( www. nelincs.gov.uk/libraries-and-archives/) for details of Grimsby crew lists (1884–1914) and merchant vessel crew lists, while alongside the usual county guide Genuki has a database of bastardy records from newspaper reports of petty sessions 1840–55 ( genuki.org.uk/big/eng/LIN/bastardycases.html).
Finally an index to wills proved at the Lincoln Consistory Court (1701-1800) can be downloaded here: lincolnshire.gov.uk/lincolnconsistory- court-wills-index/129693.article.