British Cemetery and Cremation Records from Deceased Online

Next week sees the celebration of the UN's International Day of Friendship. In this week's blog, I reflect the importance of friendship by looking at some of the ways friend remember each other after death. The United Nations (UN) proclaimed the International Day of Friendship in 2011, aiming to celebrate the role friendship between people, countries, cultures and individuals can play in leading to peace. The UN encourages governments to mark the day annually on the 30th July with events and initiatives that contribute to international efforts in mutual understanding and reconciliation. As family historians, we often focus more on biological relationships than on friendships. However, our friends play a big part in our lives and some of our ancestors had companions who were more important to them than family. One problem when researching friendship in our families' pasts is that those relationships are not always recorded. There may be a reference to a friend in a will o...

Tomorrow, Friday 1st August, more records from our Aberdeenshire collection will go online. These records complete the Aberdeenshire dataset of more than 200 burial grounds and cemeteries. Among them there are approximately 250,000 individual burials or names and a total of around 600,000 separate records dating back to 1615.   Dunnottar Castle This new release includes the beautiful coastal parishes of St Cyrus and Dunnottar . Dunnottar is notable for its castle, perched dramatically on a rocky headland overlooking the North Sea.  The castle and parish have an amazing history as the site of royal visits, Jacobite rebellion  . . . and the wedding of my 3x great grandparents, James Jolly and Margaret Henderson in January 1832. As well as the records for the county of Aberdeenshire, the Deceased Online database holds half of Aberdeen City 's records - the other half are coming soon. Neighbouring councils, Angus and Moray are also working with Deceased On...

Recently, I looked at the etiquette of mourning in the Victorian and Edwardian period, and the influence of Queen Victoria. This week, I examine alternative approaches to the Victorian funeral. Queen Victoria was the head of the Church of England until her death in 1901. Thousands of Victorians followed her example after the death of Prince Albert by arranging elaborate Anglican funerals for their loved ones. Although the Church of England was the official religion, according to the Religious Census of 1851, it was not followed by the majority of the population . Non-conformist forms of Christianity were increasingly popular in the latter half of the 19th century and would have a significant impact on the funeral practices of their adherents. In 1851, non-Anglican Christians included Scottish Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, Society of Friends, Unitarians, Moravians, Wesleyan Methodists, Calvinistic Methodists, Sandemanians, New Church, Brethren, Roman Catholics, Catholic and ...

This week, I look at the social and cultural influences on the design of Victorian and Edwardian cemeteries, monuments and headstones Currently, there are around a thousand Victorian-built cemeteries on the Deceased Online database . I have included a number of images from them in this blog. Many more can be found on the website . Mourning practices and artefacts, such as rings and lockets of the deceased's hair, were in common use when Victoria acceded the throne in 1837. But the elaborate funerary rituals we associate with the Victorian era only became widespread from 1861, after the sudden death of Prince Albert. The widowed Queen Victoria began a period of mourning that would last forty years until her own death in 1901. Jet mourning jewellery from the Victorian period By the 1890s, described by Julian Litten as 'the golden age of the funeral', Britons of all backgrounds were were copying the royal manner of bereavement. They wore black dresses, crape, gloves,...