British Cemetery and Cremation Records from Deceased Online

This week Deceased Online adds records from three more cemeteries in its Calderdale Collection. The latest cemeteries are all market towns in West Yorkshire. In this week's blog I explore further the history of the area, touching on the collapse of the textile industry and its effects regionally. View of Elland by Dave59 at English Wikipedia - Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Mtaylor848 using CommonsHelper., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7497912 As I wrote in my introductory post on the Calderdale Collection , this borough of former mill towns, moorland and waterways lies at the foothills of the Pennine Hills. Until the late 20th century, its economic life was dominated by textile industries. Calderdale comprises small towns whose cotton, worsted and wool mills were powered across the centuries by the fast-running waters of the River Calder. The latest additions to the Deceased Online database are for the cemeteries of Elland, Ludden...

This week Deceased Online will launch a new collection of burial and cemetery records from Blackburn & Darwen in Lancashire. Here I look at the history of Blackburn and the background to lives of many who are remembered in the burial registers. I grew up in rural Lancashire, about 30 miles away from the heartland of the former cotton industry that is Blackburn and Darwen. Although there were a few mills around the area in which I lived, they were nothing compared with the vast numbers of mills and factories that emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries in Blackburn, Darwen and their near neighbours, Preston and Burnley. Like Blackburn, my village lay in the shadow of the brooding Pennine hills and our grass was bright green from regular rainfalls. Jubilee Tower, Darwen (c) John Darch Today, Blackburn is remembered as "Cotton Town", a name that lives on in an excellent local history project: http://www.cottontown.org/Pages/default.aspx  The origins of the town's ...