I was intending to post this message anyway but today's Cheshire list posts brought one about the January meeting of my local Cheshire FHS group which is devoted to beginning family history. Starting my researches in 1995 one of my very first tasks was to assemble all I could find locally in the Stockport area about my four main known family names ... those of my grandparents viz. LEIGH, MILLWARD, BRUCKSHAW and WILLIAMSON. At that time the Stockport Heritage Library did not have the Stockport Cemetery burial records either on film or microfiche so I went to the Stockport Cemetery Office and asked for permission to search the all burial records from about 1830 until the advent of cremation. They willingly gave me permission and I must have visited the office about 20 times recording all instances of burials of my 4 names. I then entered all the information I had collected, name, date of burial, age, grave number, burial address etc. on a spreadsheet and printed out separate tables for each surname arranged in given name order and grave number order. Of course I have kept the original notebooks .. a little dog-eared now. I also cross referenced each entry with a link to the notebook page on which it appeared to minimise transcription errors at the spreadsheet creation stage. I also created cross references to notebook pages on which apparently-related individuals appeared. Those tables have been, and remain, valuable tools for linking names into family groups. I still refer to them roughly weekly. Of course during the following 20 years I have many more relevant surnames and events and I often feel that a visit to the library is necessary. One such case concerns the burial of my 3 x great grandmother WILLIAMSON (first marriage name) in 1859 (from Family Search). She had remarried and was buried from Ratcliffe St. as COLECLOUGH and so is not on my 4 lists. Two years later in the 1861 census her WILLIAMSON grandson and 2 WILLIAMSON sons also appeared to live in Ratcliffe St. in separate properties. A knowledge of her grave number and house number would help to confirm the relationship. It may be that the Cemetery burial records have by now been digitised or at least microfilmed. (If anyone has access to them I would dearly love a lookup) and if they are now on CD I would buy it like a shot. Eric Millward ----- No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 2015.0.5577 / Virus Database: 4257/8865 - Release Date: 01/04/15