Hollywood actress Meryl Streep may not have had ancestors who came from Lincolnshire after all.

The star made the claim linking her to the county after winning the Outstanding Actress award for her role as Grantham-born former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady at last night's Baftas.

She said: "Half of me is Streep and the other half is Wilkinson from Lincolnshire so I come by it honestly, this part."

But Market Rasen author Sue Allan, who writes a blog for ancestry.co.uk, can find no family link to Lincolnshire.

Sue, who has written novels on the  Pilgrim Fathers and runs Mayflower Pilgrim Tours, said: "I'm afraid she could be mistaken. Her eighth great-grandfather Lawrence Wilkinson, who was born in 1620 and was of the first Europeans to settle in Rhode Island, came from Durham, not Lincolnshire.

"It would have been lovely to say 'yes, her ancestors came from Lincolnshire' - and for Meryl to have that link with the role she played in the film.

"But early Connecticut families are well documented because they are proud of their families.

"I worked her tree back and compared it with other trees and it does not pan out exactly as she said.

"Her ancestors are very early settlers and so, as most of the earliest (after Jamestown and Pilgrim Fathers) came with John Cotton and after from Boston in Lincolnshire, maybe she simply assumed hers did as well.

"I do not know where a direct Lincolnshire link through the Wilkinsons can be, looking at the facts - unless, of course, she knows differently and that there is a secondary line somewhere that meanders back via Robin Hood's barn. But, if so it is not obvious."

You can view the family tree by visiting this link.

Streep also paid tribute to Market Rrasen area actor Jim Broadbent during the ceremony. She said of her co-star who played Denis Thatcher in The Iron Lady:  "I want to thank the soulful Jim Broadbent."  

Broadbent was also nominated for Best Supporting Actor but lost out to Christopher Plummer, now 82, for his moving portrayal of a late developing gay man in Beginners.