Genealogy Chat

If you know where an ancestor is buried but don't know the exact location of the gravestone within the cemetary - does anyone at the local church or cemetary keep a list of people and their burial plots? I have several ancestors buried in very large cemetaries and i think it would take too long to search every gravestone, not to mention looking very suspicious! Any info appreciated! Thank you!

There are 2 ways of doing this. 1) Your local authority should keep records of the people buried in a particular cemetry, you would need dates and names. 2) Your local council should hold microfiche and film whereby you can look up the names yourself and get the grave number. it is prob better to ring as they usually send a plan of the cemetry showing where the grave numbers are and if you have the names will give you the number.If the cemetry is an old one it should still be maintained by the council. They usually havea dept called parks and cemetries. Hope this helps. Catherine

If you fancy wandering around a graveyard then you do not need to worry about feeling suspicious - loads of people do it, myself included! I found several people who were buried that i had not known about previously. If you are looking for someone specific then getting the cemetry list is a good idea; however if you are just looking for possible links then a graveyar can be an intersting place to start! Alison

Another thing we have started doing is taking photos of gravestones using a digital camera(you don't get funny looks in max Spielmans that way) We then download them to pc for future use. 1) Its a permanent record as a lot are getting destroyed by vandals 2) If you do a surname sweep, you can link them in later to your tree 3) You get a lot of extra family names from them sometimes If we are doing more than one church on the same day we also take a picture of the church, it usually turns out it is where they got married, baptised. NOTE Just remember to give each picture a title/place on your pc srtaight away or you will forget where they come from. Good Luck George

I actually took my two poor children out for a day trip last week to visit a graveyard! It took and hour and a half on two buses, then a mile walk. They were not too impressed (aged 4 & 9). The youngest kept asking if a hand might come up and grab him. I think he's been watching the wrong sort of TV. I cheered them up with a pub dinner afterwards and they decided they'd have quite a nice day out after all.

Does the grave list also count for public graves? On a visit to East London Cemetary I was told that public graves are not mapped and I would need to come back when there was a grave digger availble! Are the records for the cemetaries only held locally?

Hello George, I also take photo's of gravestones only the other week I went to Caistor where most of my ancestors seem to have come from and I found 59 headstones, I am now busy linking them all up. From Sue..........

Check the church in GENUKI, it might tell you if the graveyard has been indexed. Try looking up the local FHS and see if they have the M.I. in their catalogue. Do a WWW search in case someone has indexed the graveyard themselves, it could even be online. Sometimes you can get a reference number of the grave but nothing to indicate where it is located. MB