British Cemetery and Cremation Records from Deceased Online

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,...

This week we mark the completion of the digitization of the records of Manor Park Cemetery and Crematorium All 430,000 burial and cremation records for Manor Park in East London are now online and available to search on the Deceased Online database . One of the (very large) burial registers from 1875-1898 This week we added burial records from 25 March 1875 to 15 December 1898. These records include scans of the burial registers, as well as maps of the grave sections and details of the occupants of each grave.  High numbers of deaths in this period led to the Cemetery being quickly filled with graves and headstones. This twenty-five year period saw around 160,000 burials, many due to a continually increasing population and the extreme levels of poverty in London’s East End. Amongst the dead were thousands of children, including young infants. The page below, from the burial register of August 1889, shows the burial details of ten children. One was only 36 h...