Records explained

Plain answers about Yorkshire's burial records, memorial inscriptions and how to find a grave.

About Yorkshire Burials

What is Yorkshire Burials?

Yorkshire Burials is a free, volunteer-run website for finding people buried in Yorkshire and the graves they lie in. It brings together burial registers, grave photographs and memorial inscriptions, cemetery by cemetery, across the whole of historic Yorkshire.

On the site you can:

• search transcribed burial registers by name, place and date
• see photographs of headstones, with their inscriptions typed out
• find cemeteries and churchyards on a map, with directions
• use grave plans to find where a grave lies in a cemetery
• read the YAS memorial inscriptions

The cemetery pages, maps and help pages are open to everyone. The burial records and photographs need a free account (see below for why).

The work is done by volunteers, who photograph graves and transcribe registers. Anyone can help: see Volunteer.

Why do I need to log in to see the records?

So that the records stay accurate, and stay with the people who keep them accurate. Creating an account is free.

Records from Yorkshire Burials have been the subject of unauthorised bulk copying, and put on another large website without our permission. That copying led to errors: many records were transposed wrongly, and those errors then mislead researchers who cannot see where the record came from or that it has since been corrected. Asking people to log in, and limiting how many records can be viewed at once, stops unauthorised bulk copying and the errors it leads to.

Our records are never finished. Old handwriting is hard to read, and many corrections come from people who know a family or a name better than we do. Every record is kept under review: you can report a mistake or suggest a correction from any record, and our editors check each one and keep a history of every change. Reading the records here means you always see the latest, checked version.

You are welcome to use what you find for your own research. To reproduce records or photographs elsewhere, see our Reproduction policy.

Records explained

What is a parish register?

A parish register is the book in which a Church of England parish recorded its baptisms, marriages and burials. Parishes in England have kept them since 1538, so for most people who died before the 1850s the parish burial register is the main record that they were buried.

What an entry says depends on its date:

• 1538 to 1812: entries were written by hand, often brief: a name, the burial date, and perhaps "son of" or "widow of". Some early ones are in Latin.
• From 1813: Rose's Act brought in printed registers with set columns: name, abode, when buried, age, and who performed the ceremony. Ages and places make these much easier to use.

Each year a copy, called the Bishop's transcript, was sent to the bishop. For Yorkshire's Church of England parishes these are mostly at the Borthwick Institute in York, and they help where a register is lost or damaged.

Parish registers record burials in the churchyard, and sometimes burials of parishioners elsewhere. Chapels and other churches kept their own registers.

What is a burial register?

A burial register is the book a cemetery kept of every burial in it, in date order. Yorkshire's town cemeteries opened as the old churchyards became full, most of them from the 1850s, run by burial boards and later by councils. Leeds led the way: Hunslet and Burmantofts (Beckett Street) cemeteries, opened in 1845 six weeks apart because the town had run out of burial space, were the first municipal cemeteries in the country. Some towns had private cemetery companies earlier still, such as Leeds General Cemetery (1835). Cemetery registers carry on from the parish registers.

A cemetery burial register usually gives more than a parish register. A typical entry has:

• an entry number
• the name, age and abode (where the person lived)
• the date of burial, and often the date of death
• the grave number and section, and whether the grave was consecrated or unconsecrated
• the minister who took the service
• sometimes a description or occupation ("Whitesmith", "Widow of"), the cause of death, or the undertaker

The grave number is the key to finding the grave itself, and to finding who else is buried in it.

What is a grave book?

A grave book (or grave register) is the cemetery's record of each grave rather than each burial. It is arranged by grave number and shows who owned the grave (who bought the right of burial in it) and everyone buried in it.

It answers questions the burial register cannot easily answer:

• who else lies in the same grave
• who bought the grave, and when
• whether the grave is a common (public) grave or a private one

The burial register is in date order and the grave book is in grave order, so each is the index to the other. Where both survive, Yorkshire Burials links them, so a record shows everyone in the same grave.

Types of burial and grave

What are the types of burial?

Most records on Yorkshire Burials are burials in a grave, but registers also record cremations and what happened to the ashes. These are the kinds you will see:

A few records are reinterments, where remains were moved from one grave or cemetery to another, usually noted in the register.

What do consecrated, unconsecrated and general mean?

They tell you which part of the cemetery a grave is in. Victorian town cemeteries were divided in two:

• Consecrated: ground blessed by the Church of England bishop, for Church of England burials.
• Unconsecrated: ground for everyone else: Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists and other nonconformists, and those of no church. Some cemeteries call it general ground; it means the same.

Each side often had its own chapel and its own run of grave numbers, so a cemetery can have two graves with the same number, one on each side. That is why Yorkshire Burials shows the side with the grave number: Consecrated 412 and Unconsecrated 412 are different graves.

Roman Catholic and Jewish burials were often in separate sections or burial grounds of their own.

What is a family plot (multi-plot)?

A family plot is two or more graves that belong together, usually bought by one family and marked by one headstone. On Yorkshire Burials these are called multi-plots.

Each grave keeps its own number in the records, so the family can be split across two numbers, such as 252 and 253, with only one of them named on the stone. When volunteers link the graves as a multi-plot, the site tells you about the others wherever you find one of them: on the record, on the photograph and on the grave plan. Finding one person can then lead you to the rest of the family.

What is a common or public grave?

A common (or public) grave was owned by the cemetery, not a family, and used for several unrelated people, often those whose families could not afford a private grave. Several people may be listed under one grave number with different surnames. These graves rarely have a headstone, so the register and grave book are often the only record of who lies there.

A private grave is one where a family bought the right of burial, so only people they chose could be buried in it.

Memorial inscriptions

What is a memorial inscription?

A memorial inscription (MI, or monumental inscription) is the wording on a headstone, kerb, plaque or other grave marker, copied out word for word. It often names several members of a family, with dates of death, ages and relationships, and sometimes where they lived or how they died.

Inscriptions add things registers leave out:

• family members buried elsewhere or lost at sea or in war, remembered on the family stone
• married women's maiden names, and how people were related
• verses and words that say something about the family

On Yorkshire Burials, volunteers photograph each stone and type out its inscription. A "/" marks the end of a line on the stone, and words in square brackets, such as [Kerb] or [Vase], describe where the words are.

What are the YAS memorial inscriptions?

The YAS memorial inscriptions come from 15 large archival boxes held by the Yorkshire Archaeological and Historical Society (YAS): more than 35,000 pages of inscriptions recorded in churchyards and burial grounds at selected places across the whole of Yorkshire, many before the stones were moved, worn away or lost. The Yorkshire Indexers (Yorkshire Burials) scanned every page, and the inscriptions were transcribed in a joint project with the YAS. Their transcriptions are searchable on Yorkshire Burials, with the people named on each memorial, and are linked from the matching burial records where we can.

Why might a headstone and the register not agree?

The register was written at the burial; the headstone was often put up later, sometimes years later, by the family. So:

• ages and dates can differ by a year or more
• a stone may name people buried elsewhere, or not name everyone in the grave
• spellings can differ between the two

Neither is always right. Where they disagree, both are worth noting.

What if a grave has an inscription but no register survives?

Then the headstone may be the only record of the people in it. Search the inscriptions by name on the Inscriptions page: use the Name box for surnames, or "Words in the inscription" for anything else on the stone.

Finding a grave

Where can I find graves in Yorkshire?

Where someone was buried depends mostly on when they died and where they lived:

• Before about 1855: usually the churchyard of their Church of England parish, or a chapel or Quaker burial ground if they were nonconformists.
• From the 1840s and 1850s: more and more often a town cemetery. Leeds opened the country's first municipal cemeteries in 1845, and most Yorkshire towns opened one by the 1860s as their churchyards were closed to new burials. Village churchyards often carried on.
• From the 1900s: cemeteries, and increasingly cremation, with ashes buried, placed or scattered.

Yorkshire Burials lists each cemetery and churchyard, with its position on a map, what records survive and how much has been photographed. Start with Cemeteries, or search for the person by name.

What are grave sections and grave numbers?

A grave number identifies one grave in a cemetery, and the section says which part of the cemetery it is in. Sections may be letters (A, B, S), numbers (1 to 8), colours (Red, Blue), or names (Rose Border). Some cemeteries number each section from 1, so you need the section and the side (consecrated or unconsecrated) as well as the number to be sure of the grave.

The number comes from the burial register or grave book. Once you have it, you can find who else is in the grave and, where we have a grave plan, where the grave is.

What is a grave plan?

A grave plan (or plot map) shows every grave in a cemetery or section, each drawn in place with its number. On Yorkshire Burials:

• search for a grave number, or click a grave, to see who is buried there and any photographs
• the colours show what is there: a headstone, no headstone, a war grave or a grave marker
• zoomed out, section outlines and names show where each section is
• linked graves (multi-plots) are drawn with a blue line round them
• Directions opens your phone's maps app to take you to the grave

Our plans are drawn by volunteers from council plans, survey spreadsheets and photographs. They are a guide to where a grave is, not a survey, so check the numbers on the ground.

How do I find a cemetery, and is there a map of the cemetery?

The Cemeteries map shows every burial place we know of in Yorkshire, with its outline where we have one. Each cemetery's page has its address, a map, directions, its records and how much has been photographed. Where we have a grave plan, the page links to it.

For a cemetery without a plan, the council's bereavement services office, or the church for a churchyard, can often tell you where a grave is from its number. Many cemeteries also have a Friends group, whose volunteers know the ground well and may have their own maps and records.

What if the cemetery no longer exists?

Some Yorkshire burial grounds have gone: cleared, redeveloped or built over, often chapel graveyards and old town churchyards. The burials usually still happened, so the registers may survive even where the ground does not.

When a burial ground was cleared, the remains were often moved (reinterred) to another cemetery, and the headstones removed, laid flat or listed before they went. Yorkshire Burials marks these places as Cleared, and their pages say what we know: when they were cleared, and where the remains and stones went. The archives that hold the clearance records are usually the council's or the diocese's.

What should I know before visiting?

• Check opening times. Many cemeteries close at dusk.
• Old sections can be overgrown, and stones can be unsafe: never lean on or move a headstone.
• Churchyards belong to the church, so it is polite to ask before photographing in some.
• Take the grave number and section, and print or save the grave plan. Phone signal can be poor in large cemeteries.

Where Yorkshire's burial records are kept

Where are Yorkshire's burial records kept?

Older parish registers are mostly in the county archives; cemetery registers are mostly with the councils that run the cemeteries, or in the archives once a cemetery closed. Recent parish registers may still be at the church.

Many archives' registers can also be seen as images or indexes online, on Ancestry, Findmypast, TheGenealogist or FamilySearch.

Not every register is in an archive. Some burial registers are still held by the churches themselves, some are in private hands, and some are missing altogether. Yorkshire Burials includes registers from churches and private owners that are not available anywhere else. If you know where a missing register is, or hold one yourself, please contact us.

What other websites help?

• FreeREG: free transcriptions of parish registers.
• FreeBMD: a free index of births, marriages and deaths registered in England and Wales from 1837.
• GRO (General Register Office): the official index, with ages at death, and where to order certificates.
• FamilySearch, Ancestry, Findmypast, TheGenealogist: register images and indexes (some free, some paid).
• Deceased Online: some councils' cemetery and cremation registers.
• CWGC: the Commonwealth War Graves Commission's record of war dead and their graves.
• Find a Grave and BillionGraves: grave photographs added by the public.
• Family history societies: many have transcribed local registers and inscriptions.
• Cemetery Friends groups: volunteers who care for a cemetery, research the people buried there and often run tours and keep their own records. Many are listed by the National Federation of Cemetery Friends.