Genealogy Part 7 – Graveyards

Gravestones can provide useful information about when a person dies and may also contain information about the immediate relationships of that person. You will often find other relatives in nearby graves. Unfortunately many old gravestones are hard to read, may be broken, may have fallen over and in some cases be removed altogether.

Some caution is needed with evidence from gravestones. The information on gravestones is not always accurate, often they were erected several years after the event.

Many local family history societies have records of burials for their area find them here:
www.genfair.com

For instance, in Cheshire:
www.genfair.com/shop/pages/chs/index.html

The Federation of Family History Societies has combined the work of many societies to produce the National Burial Index. The National Burial Index (second edition) contains over 13 million records burial entries in English and Welsh parish, nonconformist, Roman Catholic and cemetery registers. The best coverage is in the 19th century but the National Burial Index contains burials from 1538 to modern times.

7.1    The National Burial Index

The National Burial Index is available CD. The Federation of Family History Societies also offer a pay-per-view service providing online databases of UK information for family history and genealogical research here:
www.familyhistoryonline.net

Many local authorities have information about burials in their graveyards.  Some cemeteries have quite detailed information useful for genealogists, e.g. Sheffield: www.gencem.org/search.html

There are various sites on the web listing graves, but none of them cover all the sites (so try using Google as well):

www.interment.net

www.findagrave.com

www.cemsearch.co.uk

http://members.lycos.co.uk/jimsweb/cemeteries.htm

http://userdb.rootsweb.com/uki

More information on cemeteries is available here:

www.cyndislist.com/cemetery.htm#Locality

Next: Military Records

Genealogy Course Index

Bill Pearson’s Home Page

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *