As the local council officially announces the launch of our Lincoln Collection, I look back at the social changes that led to the opening of the city's first cemetery in 1856. The Lincoln Collection on Deceased Online incorporates over 140,000 records dating back to the 1850s. Of the five cemeteries in the collection, three - Canwick Road, Eastgate, and Newport - date from 1856. But Lincoln's councillors had identified a need for a cemetery almost decade earlier. Gravestones in Lincoln's first cemetery at Canwick Road On the 12th November 1846, the Lincolnshire Chronicle reported that the Cemetery Committee worried that: "it appeared to be an impossibility to form a Cemetery in Lincoln at present, in consequence of the expense and trouble which would arise. Instead the Council proposed to focus on clearing the "nuisances now existing in the town" and to pass a bill for ""sanatory [sic] improvement". One of the key difficultie