British Cemetery and Cremation Records from Deceased Online

When I was sixteen, only one family in my neighbourhood conspicuously celebrated Hallowe'en . This was an American family who, it seemed to me, were having more fun at this time of year than everyone else. Every day in the week leading up to the 31st October I noticed new ghoulish decorations attached to the front of their house and increasingly excited children returning home. Today, I see carved pumpkins in almost every other window. Trick-or-treating is more popular in Britain than ever, and more of us are adopting US-style costumes and make-up for the night. But beyond the orange decorations and spooky costumes lies a serious tradition. Hallowe'en - or All Hallows' Even(ing) - held great meaning for many of our ancestors. Different regions had unique ways of counting the hours until the Christian feast of All Saints' Day (All Hallows or Hallowmas) on the 1st November. The origins of the festival appear to be non-Christian, coming from the ancient Celtic night...

This week, Deceased Online uploads the remaining parts of the Redcar and Cleveland dataset. I also look at a selection of new features on the website which make collection easier to search and provide more flexibility - and at the bottom of the page, part 2 of the competition to win a copy of my new book. Records for the remaining four cemeteries from Redcar and Cleveland are now available: Loftus                                                  opened 1875   8,651 records Redcar                                           ...

We're really excited about this week's addition of cemetery records from North Yorkshire This week over half of the burial records for Redcar & Cleveland Borough Council will be added to the Deceased Online database . This is the first area for us from North Yorkshire, and the second Yorkshire council (after Wakefield , West Yorkshire) on the website. Redcar and Cleveland is located on the beautiful north east coastline. Although largely rural, the area has a strong mining history. Other historical highlights of the area are the ruined Augustinian Gisborough Priory , Kirkleatham Museum , Cleveland Ironstone Mining Museum , Winkies Castle , the bronze age Eston Nab hill fort, and the Georgian mansion and home to the Pennyman family, Ormesby Hall . Redcar & Cleveland Borough Council manages eight cemeteries completely. We uploaded four of these this week:   Boosbeck                ...

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...

To link with Deceased Online's forthcoming competition to win one of five copies of my new book, Tracing Your Ancestors Using the Census (Pen & Sword, 2013), this week's post examines the use of burial records and censuses in family history research.  Besides records of birth/baptism, marriage and death/burial, census records are some of the most commonly used in genealogy. Once you have found a burial record on the Deceased Online database , you may want to look further into the life of the deceased person. Using the details on the burial record alongside those in censuses will help to give you a more rounded picture of your ancestor and his or her life. Most family historians use the Victorian and Edwardian censuses of 1841-1911 . These were taken every ten years and have been digitized on a number of databases. The original records are held at The National Archives. The 1841 census was the first to name each individual (as opposed to just heads of household)...