English cemeteries are a useful tool for genealogists or anyone tracing their family history in England today. England has some of the oldest and most substantial extant graveyards found anywhere in Europe. It also has some of the largest cemeteries in Europe, particularly ones like Brookwood cemetery, in and around London. For nearly 100 years between the 1820s and the 1910s this city was the largest metropolis in the world and the most populous urban center in Europe for a quarter of a millennium between the early eighteenth century and the second half of the twentieth. As such, it has needed enormous graveyards for centuries. As in any country, cemeteries and gravestones provide details on the deceased in centuries gone by which might otherwise not be available through civil registration records or in terms of what they reveal about the family or personality of the deceased.[1]
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History of English cemeteriesHistory of English cemeteries
Studies have identified cave gorges that were being used as burial sites in Somerset in England over 10,000 years ago, not long after the end of the last ice age.[2] Stonehenge, one of the most sophisticated and famous prehistoric monumental edifices to be constructed anywhere in the world, was used for about five centuries as a cremation cemetery by Neolithic people on Salisbury Plain and the surrounding parts of southern England.[3] Nearly 2,000 years after the Roman conquest of Britain first commenced in 43 CE, there are still occasional Roman burial sites being uncovered in England.[4]
However, the kinds of cemeteries which might be of widespread use for genealogical studies today are Christian cemeteries developed as burial sites after the conversion of the country from the sixth century onwards. Owing to the lack of major wars on English soil because of Britain’s position as an island, and also the political and religious stability of England, relative to its European neighbors, over the past half a millennium, there are many cemeteries in England which date back to medieval times. Yet, as elsewhere in Europe and the Americas, the majority of cemeteries that are intact today date to the period since the seventeenth century, with large graveyards only appearing in the second half of the eighteenth century as municipal authorities began planning how to deal with an expanding need for large burial sites as England’s towns turned into cities during the Industrial Age. Some of the foremost cemeteries for genealogical studies are found in and around cities like London and Manchester and date to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.[5]
English cemeteries and genealogical researchEnglish cemeteries and genealogical research
Because civil registration was introduced into England and Wales in 1837, once could argue that the utility of cemeteries for studying a person’s family history is limited to the pre-1837 period.[6] After all, why would a person need to consult a headstone or a grave-plaque to find out details of when an ancestor died when they could more easily obtain those details form a birth cert? There is some truth to this, but in reality cemetery records can reveal things beyond the date of somebody’s death. For instance, the kind of headstone used and what is written on it can reveal more personal details about the person’s family life. The graveyard or cemetery they were interred in might also reveal something about the manner of their death not generally revealed in a death cert. For instance, cholera graveyards sprang up in the nineteenth century in England during outbreaks of what was such a virulent disease across Europe at that time that it was termed ‘the blue death’.[7]
If the cemetery contains graves dating prior to 1837 it might well reveal details of the death of an ancestor for whom another record does otherwise not exist. This is especially the case because the parish registers kept by the Church of England, the primary demographic records kept for England since the sixteenth century, are less reliable for the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Indeed, one of the main reasons for introducing civil registration in 1837 was that the parish registers were not being accurately kept in a changing society. Thus, for the period between around 1750 and 1837, cemeteries can prove an especially useful resource for genealogists tracing ancestors in England. Many large English cemeteries have digitized the records of headstones and grave-plaques on their premises.[8] An index to nearly twenty million burial records in England from 1538 through to the end of the twentieth century is available through MyHeritage. The BillionGraves resource, an ever-growing repository of images of more than 40 million headstones worldwide, some from England, can also be accessed through MyHeritage.
Important English cemeteriesImportant English cemeteries
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As with any large or mid-sized country, there are hundreds of cemeteries in England. Here are some of the largest and most historically significant:
- Bunhill Fields, London – A burial site for non-conformist Protestants in London, Bunhill Fields dates as far back as the 1660s. Famous individuals interred here include the author of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe, and the great early Romantic poet, William Blake.[9]
- Islington and St Pancras cemetery, London – Opened in 1854 as a cemetery managed by the corporation of the city of London, at a time when the city had become the largest in the world, Islington and St Pancras cemetery is still operating today. Well over a million people have been buried here.[10]
- Brookwood cemetery, Surrey – Brookwood was opened southwest of London in the early 1850s. It is the largest cemetery in Britain and one of the largest in Europe.[11]
- Hitchin cemetery, Hertfordshire – Opened in 1857 as one of the many cemeteries established at the time to deal with the cholera epidemic, this is one of the largest cemeteries in England, located in the English East Midlands.[12]
- Southern cemetery, Manchester – Opened in 1879 after a century in which Manchester had grown form a town to a sprawling industrial city, the cemetery is still in operation today and nearly a million people have been buried there.[13]
- Arnos Vale cemetery, Bristol – For centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution, Bristol was actually the second largest city in England, second only to London. When Arnos Vale opened in 1839 it was conceived as a garden cemetery. Approximately 170,000 people have been buried there since.[14]
See alsoSee also
Explore more about English cemeteriesExplore more about English cemeteries
- England & Wales, Death Index, 1837-2005 records collection on MyHeritage
- England & Wales Deaths, GRO Indexes, 1969-2007 records collection on MyHeritage
- United Kingdom, Death Index, 1980-2022 records collection on MyHeritage
- United Kingdom, Select Burial and Cremation Index, 1840-2014 records collection on MyHeritage
- BillionGraves records collection on MyHeritage
- Amazing Ways to Use Death Records for Family History Research at the MyHeritage Blog
References
- ↑ D. Joshua Taylor, ‘The Genealogy Factor: Graveyards & Gravestones’, JSTOR Daily, 23 April 2015.
- ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/sep/24/artsandhumanities.arts
- ↑ https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/stonehenge/history-and-stories/history/
- ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jun/13/incredibly-rare-roman-tomb-unearthed-near-london-bridge-station
- ↑ James Steven Curl, ‘The Architecture and Planning of the Nineteenth-Century Cemetery’, in Garden History, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Summer, 1975), pp. 13–41.
- ↑ https://media.nationalarchives.gov.uk/index.php/early-civil-registration/
- ↑ https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/coping-with-cholera/
- ↑ https://media.nationalarchives.gov.uk/index.php/english-burial-and-cemetery-records-online-and-on-film/
- ↑ https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/things-to-do/city-gardens/find-a-garden/bunhill-fields-burial-ground
- ↑ https://www.cwgc.org/our-war-graves-your-history/explore-great-britain/london/st-pancras-cemetery-islington-cemetery-and-crematorium/
- ↑ https://www.woking.gov.uk/property-and-land/brookwood-cemetery
- ↑ https://www.north-herts.gov.uk/hitchin-cemetery
- ↑ https://www.manchester.gov.uk/info/200032/deaths_funerals_and_cemeteries/5099/manchester_cemeteries_and_blackley_crematorium/6
- ↑ https://www.bristol.gov.uk/residents/museums-parks-sports-and-culture/parks-and-open-spaces/parks-and-estates/arnos-vale-cemetery