British Cemetery and Cremation Records from Deceased Online

This week tributes are being paid across Europe and the world to those who served one hundred years ago at the Battle of the Somme. In this week's post, I look at two extraordinary men who survived both the battle and the First World War, and whose cremation records are found in the Deceased Online database. The first day of the Battle of the Somme, the 1st of July 1916, remains the bloodiest 24 hours in British military history. Those soldiers of the British Empire who went "over the top" on this day a century ago had no idea how devastating this battle would be. Tens of thousands of men walked out of their trenches and straight into German machine-gun fire. On just this one day, 19,240 were killed and around 40,000 wounded. Those that survived were left with lifelong turmoil. Musicians like Ralph Vaughan Williams and writers such as J.R.R. Tolkein would, famously, transmute their experiences through art. Others were left with "shell shock" or what we now u...

Data protection is an important aspect of family history research, and use of documents and data. While genealogists like to explore as many records as possible of their deceased ancestors, records offices and websites need to balance this against legal requirements to protect the privacy of the living. In this post, I look at Deceased Online's approach to this subject and explain why some of the records in the database have been redacted. Where burial or cremation registers contain information about possibly living people, Deceased Online , like other data providers, is obliged to mask (or redact) the personal details in the register scans. The legal requirements are set forth in the UK's Data Protection Act . Further privacy measures are taken as a result of the individual preferences of the participating cemeteries and crematoria whose records have been published by Deceased Online . At first glance, it may appear that Deceased Online's database holds information on...