British Cemetery and Cremation Records from Deceased Online

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...

The Deceased Online database includes diverse records from church burial registers, urban cemeteries and modern crematoria. In this post I look at the history of cremation in Britain and feature some examples from Deceased Online's collections. Although the practice of cremating dead bodies was common in Hindu, Jain, Buddhist and Sikh cultures, cremation did not become legal in Britain until 1885. The Queen's Physician, Sir Henry Thompson (1820-1904), helped to form the Cremation Society of Great Britain on 13 January 1874. Thompson, the Society's first President, was concerned about the insanitary nature of urban burial grounds as well as the lengthy and increasingly costly nature of Victorian burials. The Cremation Society set about funding Britain's first crematorium in Woking, Surrey. Sir Henry Thompson (1820-1904) Not all Britons embraced the new practice. On 26 December 1878, the Vicar of Woking complained to The Times : Sir, -I read lately in the Recor...

Deceased Online now holds searchable burial records for over 150,000 individuals from 100 sites across Aberdeenshire. I am especially pleased that these include registers from the old county of Kincardineshire, the home of my JOLLY ancestors. In celebration of the new Kincardineshire and Aberdeenshire records being uploaded to the database, this week I look at my family connection to the history of Benholm parish and its cemetery. My great great grandfather William Jolly (1842-1889) enlisted in the Royal Engineers in May 1867. He was shortly transferred to England, and by 1871 he was living in barracks at the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria & Albert Museum). He would never live in Scotland again. William Jolly R.E. in England in later years William had been born in Montrose, Forfarshire (now Angus) where his father, James Jolly, worked as a salmon fisher. But within a few years the family dispersed and William went to live with his grandfather, also Willia...

This week, I'm looking at some of Deceased Online's less-known datasets, focusing on Kettering, Corby and Rushden in the county of Northamptonshire John Speed's map of Northamptonshire c.1676 There are a total of 12 cemeteries and 1 crematorium in Deceased Online 's Northamptonshire collection. All can be searched on the website in the UK records section, under "East Midlands" in the drop-down menu . Being landlocked, Northamptonshire is an interesting region to have ancestors. Many inhabitants moved back and forth to neighbouring counties. Northamptonshire is unusual in sharing borders with nine other counties: Leicestershire, Rutland, Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, the former county of Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Warwickshire. The county is largely rural, although heavy industry predominated in Corby from the 1930s. During the 19th and 20th centuries, Northamptonshire as a whole was most celebrated for its manufact...

Deceased Online has just uploaded around 114,000 burial records from Spa Fields in the modern London borough of Islington Spa Fields today, with the Church of Our Most Holy Redeemer in the background Spa Fields Burial Ground became notorious in the 19th century for its overcrowded and insanitary conditions. Located in the parish of St James, Clerkenwell, the grave yard was not far from the ever-increasing City of London. Spa Fields was known also as Clerkenwell Fields and Ducking-pond Fields in the late 18th century, hinting at a dark side to what was then a summer evening resort for north Londoners. What would become a cemetery was a ducking pond in the rural grounds of a Spa Fields public house. It was here in 1683 that six children were drowned while playing on the ice. In his History of Clerkenwell (1865) William J. Pinks wrote that visitors, "came hither to witness the rude sports that were in vogue a century ago, such as duck-hunting, prize-fighting, bull-baiting...

Deceased Online's Bunhill Fields collection has proved very popular so far. Thank you to all who have been in touch about the nonconformist ancestors (including Huguenots) you have found in the database. This week, I look at the later years of the collection, 1800-1854. Headstones and monuments in Bunhill Fields By 1800, Bunhill Fields was well-established as a burial ground for nonconformist Londoners. Some of the most important figures in the Methodist movement were interred there, including Susanna Wesley and Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon . Buried in 1808, Theophilus Lindsey (1723-1808) , one of the founders of Unitarianism, lies nearby. So significant to dissenters was the graveyard that even those who died away from London were brought to Bunhill Fields to be buried: the Scottish minister Henry Hunter (1741-1802) died in Bristol but was laid to rest at Bunhill on 6 November 1802. Burial entry of Jabez Carter Hornblower (1744-1814), showing his date of bu...