British Cemetery and Cremation Records from Deceased Online

This week I catch up with Deceased Online's new collections and summarize what's currently available to help locate ancestors who died in London View of London from Greenwich Cemetery, one of the London cemeteries featured in the Deceased Online database After the 1830s, when my 3x great grandparents, Edward Barnes and Mary Ashley , arrived in the capital, hundreds of members of my family have been born in London, settled there or passed through. Millions of us around the world have at least one ancestor who died in London between the 18th century and today. Although most of Deceased Online 's London collections date from the 19th and 20th centuries, there are a number of records from the 18th century, including that of the Robinson Crusoe author Daniel Defoe , who was buried in Bunhill Hill Fields in 1731. Daniel Defoe was buried at Bunhill Fields in the heart of London Researching London ancestors is complicated by the changing nature of its administrative ...

Deceased Online has just uploaded around 114,000 burial records from Spa Fields in the modern London borough of Islington Spa Fields today, with the Church of Our Most Holy Redeemer in the background Spa Fields Burial Ground became notorious in the 19th century for its overcrowded and insanitary conditions. Located in the parish of St James, Clerkenwell, the grave yard was not far from the ever-increasing City of London. Spa Fields was known also as Clerkenwell Fields and Ducking-pond Fields in the late 18th century, hinting at a dark side to what was then a summer evening resort for north Londoners. What would become a cemetery was a ducking pond in the rural grounds of a Spa Fields public house. It was here in 1683 that six children were drowned while playing on the ice. In his History of Clerkenwell (1865) William J. Pinks wrote that visitors, "came hither to witness the rude sports that were in vogue a century ago, such as duck-hunting, prize-fighting, bull-baiting...