On 13/08/2013 14:54, Caroline Bradford wrote: > Sorry, Connie, but this is just not the case. Parish burial registers record > *burials* not funeral services. A vicar who conducted the latter (and who > may well have officiated at the graveside in the former) will probably have > recorded the event in some format (usually a day-book), and these records > may have found their way to the county archives but they are different from > the actual registers and there is no statutory duty for them to be kept, let > alone deposited. Are you saying that I dreamed seeing a parish church burial register with burials up to and including 1992 and it was a register not a day book? Does a burial not follow a funeral service? Are not burials preceded by a funeral service? Did I dream seeing a cemetery burial book with conformist and non conformist burials at a date after the closure of churchyards? I was told all completed registers and those over 100 years are required to be deposited in the Diocesan Record Office which is usually, but not always, the county record office. The archivist who told me that wasn't telling the truth then? -- Connie http://oursalmons.wordpress.com/

Hi Connie > Are you saying that I dreamed seeing a parish church burial register with > burials up to and including 1992 and it was a register not a day book? Does a > burial not follow a funeral service? Are not burials preceded by a funeral > service? Did I dream seeing a cemetery burial book with conformist and non > conformist burials at a date after the closure of churchyards? No, of course not. Many parishes (though it is almost exclusively rural ones) still have functioning churchyards and therefore continue to maintain burial registers. But burials are registered where they take place. If in a churchyard, they are registered in the burial register of the church, if in a cemetery then they are registered in the cemetery burial register. What religious services may or may not take place prior to the interment are not relevant to the registration of the burial, nor is the denomination of any such service. All burials within a cemetery are registered there, regardless of the religious affiliations of the deceased. > I was told all completed registers and those over 100 years are required to be > deposited in the Diocesan Record Office which is usually, but not always, the > county record office. The archivist who told me that wasn't telling the truth > then? The archivist was, of course, correct, but the fact remains that a large majority of churchyards have been closed at some point in the last 160 years so the parishes concerned no longer maintain burial registers which, as I said before, are registers of burials, not funeral services. Perhaps this extract from the Medway Archives guide explains it better than I can: "Burials may be missing from a particular parish collection altogether or, where they do exist, are discontinued after a certain date because many 19th Century urban churches were built without their own burial grounds, burials taking place in the newly established municipal burial grounds instead. Where burial registers exist for a parish but are discontinued after a certain date, it should be assumed burials had transferred to a municipal cemetery or more recently that a cremation may have taken place...Medway Ancestors includes a few parish funeral registers which are non-statutory and informal parish records containing records of cremations, burials of ashes or burials in municipal cemeteries and some service registers many of which record funerals in the parent church or a crematorium chapel and which in the former case are subject to deposit or survival and in the later case are outwith the present project" Best wishes Caroline

On Tue, 13 Aug 2013 15:38:51 +0100 Connie <connie.sparrer@gmail.com> wrote: Hello Connie, >I was told all completed registers and those over 100 years are >required to be deposited in the Diocesan Record Office which is >usually, but not always, the county record office. The archivist who >told me that wasn't telling the truth then? Not the whole truth. What you were told is what *should* happen. Many registers have simply not been surrendered for archival. There's little, if anything, the relevant Record Office can do to force the surrender of the required registers. -- Regards _ / ) "The blindingly obvious is / _)rad never immediately apparent" Going round on the Circle Line trying to find a way out Titanic (My Over) Reaction - 999

Hello Connie, Clearly a misunderstanding has come about in your search for burial/funerals. The law requires that the Anglican Church (C of E) must keep registers of b.m.d's. That law only applies to the Established Church which is the Anglican Church. It came about because Henry VIII insisted that all his subjects would be C of E., like it or not and he wanted to keep tabs on all his subjects! At that time b.m.d records in the parish churches was the easy way to achieve that end. In recent years the law stepped in to preserve the registers which were completed and over 100 years old. These must be kept in a safe place and environment. A very few parish churches are able, by complying with that specification to store their own registers. Otherwise the normal place of storage is the in the County Record Offices. Registers over 100 years old which are still in use are not under that order. With ref; burial of non Anglican people. It is also a legal right of all people to be buried in their own parish churchyard even if their faith is not Anglican. If the churchyard is closed due to being full up, then the local civil cemetery will normally be the burial place. As previously stated, the burial register is for burials, not funeral services. A funeral service could be held in the parish where the dead person lived and the body buried miles away in an ancestral grave. I hope this helps. Dennis Bramble. (Kent FHS)