British Cemetery and Cremation Records from Deceased Online

Today's taphophiles and family historians often enjoy the calm and greenery of urban cemeteries. But would today's cemetery users want to return to a Victorian policy that sought to convert burial grounds into public parks? The Hardy Tree in the grounds of St Pancras Old Church In the 1860s, the graves of the ancient pa rish churchyard of St Pancras were cleared. Among those who  helped clear and relocate burials from the old St Pancras Church graveyard to the new St Pancras and Islington Cemetery , was a y oung Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) .  A famous tree still stands in the old graveyard which bears his name.  Some of the church lands was taken by the Midland Railway. During this period, around 8,000 bodies were exhumed from their burial plots and some were relocated to the new cemetery in Finchley. Some headstones, like that of the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (1759-1797) were left standing and can still be seen in the churchyard today. ...

This week, Deceased Online launches another collection from our partners, The National Archives. The RG37 collection covers copies of records of local authorities and Church Commissioners relating to burial ground removals 1923-2007. This is not the period covering the dates of the burials (which go back to the 1600s) but purely when the records were collected. Following on from our recent work with The National Archives (TNA) to digitise the burial records of Brompton Cemetery and a number of military graveyards , Deceased Online will be adding over 175,000 records from the RG 37 collection, the first 105,000 of which are now available. These include records from Anglican, Baptist, Methodist, Quaker and nondenominational graveyards in counties across England and Wales.  There is a complete list of all records included in this latest collection on the Deceased Online website . The oldest record is from the 17th century, but most date from the Victorian and Edwar...