Skip to main content

How Does Deceased Online Work?

This week's blog is an edited version of our recent newsletter, sharing some of the secrets behind the Deceased Online Database

Deceased Online began as a joint partnership between Manuscripti Ltd and Gower Consultants Ltd. The two companies provide scanning and computer management systems respectively, with many years of experience serving the bereavement services industry. Since then Deceased Online has processed and provided millions of burial and cremation records, memorial inscriptions, and much more to the general public and for the ongoing management of those cemeteries and crematoria. Finding empty grave spaces where cemeteries appear full is another critical part of our work.
Cemetery Registers
Above: Cemetery Registers
Our process begins with scanning the physical registers held by individual cemeteries and crematoria offices. These are usually municipal records, but we do also provide services to private cemeteries and crematoria. These registers contain a record of everyone buried since the various Acts of Parliament relating to burials passed in the mid-1800s. These large books are often the only copy of this precious data and sometimes they've sustained some extensive damage through 150 years of use.
Damaged Register
Above: some registers are very damaged
We scan registers with specialist book scanners, which feature weighted, counterbalanced book cradles to enable the register to lay flat without putting any pressure on the spine. Due to the age of a lot of these registers, this is vital to prevent damage. Once scanned, the digital images are sent to data transcription teams for manual typing up into spreadsheet formats. Human eyes are absolutely necessary for the transcription of the data. We have tested various automated OCR (Optical Character Recognition) methods in the past, but found them to have a very low accuracy rate due to the colossal variety of different handwritings throughout the registers.
Scanning Registers
Above: our specialist book scanners
When the spreadsheets are completed, they are subject to extensive and thorough quality control to ensure maximum accuracy of the data. Not only do we run the data through various automated computer scripts to pull out errors, it's also checked manually by a member of our production team. Once the data has been signed off by quality control, it's loaded into our test site for testing. For most cemeteries, we're able to create section maps to help our customer find the area of the cemetery in which the grave they're looking for is located, and this needs to be linked and tested too.
Section Map
Above: a section map
Finally, when it's signed off on the test website, it's uploaded to the live site for everyone to view. Visit the coverage page on Deceased Online to see what's there.

Coming Soon
We're working hard on processing over 4,000,000 records for cemeteries and crematoria in Norfolk, the Midlands, London, the South East, and the South West, which will be coming to Deceased Online in the near future. In the meantime we hope all of our customers are staying safe.

Do you have any questions about finding your ancestors in the database? We love to hear from you. Feel free to contact us via the Comments section below or on our Facebook and Twitter pages.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

London's Spa Fields

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

Haslar and Netley Military Hospital Cemeteries

Following on from last week's post, I'm looking further into Deceased Online 's latest collection of burials. These military burials were digitized in partnership with The National Archives .  Two notable institutions in the collection are Haslar Royal Navy Cemetery and the Royal Victoria Hospital in Netley. Both Haslar and Netley (as it was more commonly known) were Britain's foremost military hospitals during the bloodiest years of war in the western hemisphere The Royal Hospital Haslar and Clayhill Royal Navy Cemetery, Gosport, Hampshire The Royal Hospital Haslar dates from 1753. For over two hundred and fifty years Haslar served as one of main hospitals caring for sailors and marines of the Royal Navy and merchant services. Patients came from ships as well as from naval and seamen institutions in nearby Portsmouth and Gosport. The hospital closed as the last official military hospital in 2007. The Haslar Cemetery closed in April 1859 but the neighbouring Cl

Wakefield Collection: Cremation Records now available on Deceased Online

Records for both crematoria in Wakefield, Yorkshire have been added to the Deceased Online database Above: Pontefract Crematorium The two sets of crematoria records have been added to Deceased Online 's Wakefield Collection .  Wakefield district contains nineteen cemeteries and two crematoria. Many of the records go back to the mid and late 19th century when the cemeteries opened, and range across a wide geographical area. The full list of  Wakefield  cemeteries live on Deceased Online,  with opening dates in brackets,   is as follows: 1.  Altofts Cemetery  – Church Road, Altofts, Normanton  (1878)   2.  Alverthorpe Cemetery  – St Paul’s Drive, Alverthorpe, Wakefield  (registers from 1955) 3. Castleford Cemetery  – Headfield Road, Castleford  (1857) 4.  Crigglestone Cemetery  – Standbridge Lane, Crigglestone, Wakefield  (1882) 5. Featherstone Cemetery  – Cutsyke Road, North Featherstone  (1874) 6. Ferrybridge Cemetery  – Pontefract Road, Ferrybridge, P