Finding Where Your Ancestors Are Buried

As part of my family history research, I have trying to find where my ancestors are buried. Perhaps rather naively, I had assumed that I would take a trip down to the graveyard in the village in which they lived and find their graves. How wrong was I! Despite the fact that the two branches of my family tree that I was focusing on both lived in relatively small villages for generations, I only found a grand total of two graves (out of a possible twenty-five). Clearly I needed to rethink my plans. If you run into similar problems, how can you track down your ancestors' final resting places?

Find their burial records: The main problem with burials is that you must be completely sure where your ancestors would have been buried. In my case, several branches of my family seem to have been buried in cemetaries, rather than churchyards, which I wasn't expecting. In addition, they were poor and could not afford to buy a plot in a churchyard or have headstones. This meant that they were usually put in unmarked graves with people who were no relation to them buried above or below.

This obviously makes them difficult to find if you are wandering around a churchyard looking for headstones, as there clearly won't be any. Despite this, it is still more than possible to find your ancestors, but it will take some extra effort.

The best place to start is a local records office or family history society. On my visit to the latter, I was able to manually search through the microfiches for the years in question to find the folio numbers for my ancestors' burials. From this, I could then view the accompanying burial index (on the same microfiche) to find the date of the burial, the address at which he or she was living at when they died, and the all-important plot number. On another microfiche, it is possible to see who is buried in the same plot and whether it was a bought grave or not. For my family, I discovered that most of them were buried apart in unmarked graves, although one or two were buried together (not in bought plots).

To do this, it helps if you are certain of the year in which your ancestor(s) would have been buried, and which cemetary or churchyard. If this is unknown, it is a case of going through multiple years and burial grounds, which is obviously a very time-consuming process. Try searching for possible deaths on the BMD (Births, Marriages and Deaths) index (which is available at www.freebmd.org.uk) to find possible death dates. This will also give you the district in which the death was registered, which can narrow down the area to a certain extent. You can use the census to narrow it down further. For example, if you find a possible death in 1868, you can check the 1861 and 1871 census returns to see whether your ancestor was indeed alive in 1861 but dead by 1871. While this isn't a foolproof way to narrow things down, it can be useful if you have little or no information to go on.

For burials before 1837 (when compulsory registration was introduced in the UK), you will need to see parish records. These can be viewed at the church(es) in question but you will need to liase with the vicar to do this and he/she will probably expect some payment for doing so. As this can be expensive if you have lots of burials to find, try a local records office. They will often have either the original parish records or have transferred them to microfiche. It's best to make an appointment as there will usually be few microfiche readers on offer and they may already be in use at the time that you want to go.