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~ Hints and tips for researching your Catholic ancestors in England and Wales

Catholic Family History

Category Archives: Church Records

FINDING THE GRAVES OF YOUR CATHOLIC ANCESTORS

18 Sunday Mar 2018

Posted by Lawrence Gregory in Archives, Church Records, Family History

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People researching their family trees often came into the Diocesan Archives expecting us to be able to identify the final resting places of their ancestors, and even maybe to find a surviving headstone full of useful information. Invariably these individuals went away sorely disappointed, and in this article, using the town of Manchester as an example, I shall explain why.

In 1854 when the government passed the Burial Act, and the Home Office ordered the closure of inner city burial grounds, the twin towns and Manchester and Salford had six Catholic graveyards, these being – Salford Cathedral, St Mary, Mulberry Street, St Chad, Cheetham Hill, St Augustine, Granby Row, St Patrick, Livesey Street, and St Wilfrid, Hulme, and Catholic inner-city dwellers up to this point would have been buried in one of these of these grounds.

Surviving Burial Records – There only exists surviving burial registers from Mulberry Street, Salford Cathedral, and Livesey Street, and none at all from Hulme, Cheetham Hill, or Granby Row. These records, although rare do provide an invaluable amount of information.

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Surviving Grave Markers – Only St Chad’s, Cheetham Hill has any surviving grave stones.

Accessible Burial Grounds – All the burial grounds have been levelled and either tarmacked or built upon, with exception to St Chad’s, Cheetham Hill.

 

19th Century Attitudes to Death and Burial

 Catholic burial and the keeping of records was not undertaken in any standardised way and it only through local newspaper reports about incidents in the burial grounds at Hulme, Salford and Granby Row we can actually start to understand what was taking place in this era.

St Wilfrid Hulme

In January 1856, the parish of St Wilfrid, Hulme found itself in the centre of a national media storm when the police began investigating into the death in August 1855 of Mr John Monaghan, of Hope Street, Chorlton on Medlock, under suspicions that he had been poisoned for a £300 life insurance policy. Monaghan had been buried in the graveyard of St Wilfrid’s and on the 24th January 1856, the City Coroner ordered his exhumation, the Manchester Courier explains what happened next:

“Canon Toole, the resident clergyman, afforded every information and assistance in his power; but on going into the chapel-yard a difficulty presented itself as the Sexton could give no information as to where Monaghan was interred…Mrs Eliza King, the daughter of the deceased… was fetched and pointed out as nearly as she could the spot… and the process of exhumation at once commenced…the first grave that was opened contained a number of coffins; but, after they had all been taken out, it was found that Monaghan was not there. Five or six other graves were opened with a like result… the men continued working vigorously until one o’clock in the morning without success…” (Manchester Courier & Lancashire General Advertiser 26/1/1856)

“… On Monday morning… Mr Sturges, contractor, of City Road, was employed to take the coffins up from such a space of ground as should settle the fact beyond doubt, as to whether the body had been removed or not. At 11 O’Clock in the forenoon five men commenced taking up the coffins in the vicinity of the place pointed out… and about 20 minutes past three, they succeeded in finding his coffin”

Hulme1

St Augustine’s, Granby Row

In 1854, the Rector of St Augustine’s Church began construction of a new school on a portion of the burial ground, the Town Clerk visited the site and wrote:

“The foundations are being dug for an intended school… and in doing so many graves have been emptied of their coffins, which were so carelessly thrown on the adjoining surface; and a large number of coffins, of which many have only been recently interred, have been exposed to public view” (The Manchester Guardian, 5/7/1854)

The Manchester Courier went into more gruesome detail:

“There has been a considerable amount of excitement in the streets situated at the sides and back of the grave-yard belonging to St Augustine’s Roman Catholic Chapel, in Granby-Row…On Thursday, when our informant saw it, the sight was absolutely sickening… the surface was uneven, but where it was of the greatest depth showed that a thin covering of earth, not in any place thicker than a foot, had been the only covering over the bodies interned, and that they had been packed side by side, one upon another, with the upmost economy of space, until it was impossible to push a pointed instrument into the ground without meeting and adult or infant body. At one point where the workmen had sunk the deepest, thirteen tiers of these coffins had been exposed, and there seemed to be a ‘lower deep’ still, so that probably the original grave pits were sunk to a depth approaching to twenty feet… The trenches had been filled in with the foundation walls, and the space exterior to them packed in, with soil taken out, pieces of coffin, and the bones which they had contained… The term excavation cannot properly be applied to the holes we have named; there was literally no earth to cut into… it was all coffins, some in the last stage of decay, others fresher – one in the top row was not even discoloured…A most noisome smell proceeded from the pits… most of those that were quite uncovered were so tender that they that had been broken by the spades and feet of the workmen and a black unctuous matter oozed out in abundance… here and there one more rotten than the rest had given way…None at which the workmen had arrived remained intact; and wherever the eye rested, some sickening remains of mortality met it. A number of curious men and women were eagerly peering into these receptacles for the dead… a man tore up a portion of a fragile lid, and a bleached and grinning skull rolled to and fro set in motion by the force. In a corner of the yard near to the chapel… a troop of little girls, who scrutinised with keen and searching glance every hole that they could discover and seemed half inclined to venture into the pits for a rummage…” (Manchester Courier & Lancashire General Advertiser 24/6/1854)

Salford Cathedral

 “The closing of the ground by the side of St John’s Roman Catholic chapel must involve a serious reduction from the revenues of that place of worship, but the place appears to have been managed in a way which does not arouse any sympathy… they had resorted to the system of common graves in its most disgusting form, and interred bodies in a huge hole, yards wide, by yards deep, into which the sacristan might pack five hundred bodies if he were so minded, and which remained open for months”

 

These three incidents give us a snap shot of Catholic inner-city burials in the first half of the 19th century, by 21st century standards the lack of respect shown for the dead is shocking, but it demonstrates for us why tracing and identifying the resting places of your Catholic ancestors is very unlikely.

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Society Seminar on Records

24 Monday Jul 2017

2017 seminar details address and application_Page_1

Posted by Lawrence Gregory | Filed under Archives, Church Records, Conference, Days Out, Family History

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New CD of Baptisms

27 Friday Jan 2017

Posted by Lawrence Gregory in CD's, Church Records, Family History, Societies

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The Manchester and Lancashire Family History have released their latest CD of Catholic baptisms, this volume contains the following Manchester Catholic registers:

  • Corpus Christi, Miles Platting: 1890-1908
  • St. Edward, Rusholme: 1862-1908
  • St John, Chorlton-cum-Hardy: 1893-1931
  • St. Mary, Levenshulme: 1853-1920
  • St. Michael, Ancoats: 1877-1917

It is available for the very reasonable price of £4.25 from their Online Bookshop

Great Harwood Catholic Registers

08 Thursday Sep 2016

Posted by Lawrence Gregory in Archives, Church Records, Churches, General Information

≈ 1 Comment

The Lancashire Catholic parish of St Hubert, Great Harwood have transcribed and published their sacramental registers on their website. The parish began in 1857.

The work has been undertaken by parishioner Maureen Barton.

See the church website for more information.

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Irish Catholic Registers

04 Friday Mar 2016

Posted by Lawrence Gregory in Archives, Church Records, Family History, Ireland

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From the 1st March 2016, all surviving Irish Catholic parish registers will be online, and fully indexed. The project has been a collaborative effort between Ancestry, and the National Library of Ireland.

More than 10 million register entries have been digitised. They will be free to access during the month of March, after which people will have to subscribe to Ancestry.

More information available from the Irish Times

Buckinghamshire Family History Society

11 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by Lawrence Gregory in Archives, Church Records, Events, General Information

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Tags

archives, registers

Buckinghamshire Family History Society Open Day
Saturday 23rd July 2016, 10am to 4pm
The Grange School, Wendover Way, Aylesbury, HP21 7NH.

Research facilities including our names database (over five million entries), Parish Register, People, and Places libraries. Parish Register transcripts and other research aids will be on sale. Expert advice; guest societies from around the country; local heritage groups; suppliers of data CDs, maps, software, archival materials and much more.

Admission is free, with free parking at the venue.

Further information, including a full list Bucksof organisations attending, can be found at http://www.bucksfhs.org.uk

St Cuthbert, Withington New CD

30 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by Lawrence Gregory in CD's, Church Records, Publications, Uncategorized

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Tags

baptism, Manchester, registers

The early baptism registers of St Cuthbert, Withington, Manchester in the Diocese of Salford have been released on CD by the Manchester and Lancashire Family History Society.

The CD can be purchased from their online bookshop

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Going online today at 2pm: Catholic Parish Registers at the NLI

08 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by Lawrence Gregory in Church Records, Libraries, News

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Tags

Ireland, online records

The National Library of Ireland today officially launches a new web-repository of Catholic parish records, dating from the 1740s to the 1880s.

The new website will be available worldwide from 2pm on 8 July.

Bishops’s Registers of London and Midland District Confirmations

18 Monday May 2015

Posted by Lawrence Gregory in Church Records, Publications

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

London, Midlands

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A (comparatively) long time ago our society produced printed publications of register transcriptions. Obviously the stocks that we hold go down over the years as items are sold. The source documents for many of these publications are now lost and so it would be very difficult to arrange a reprint, and even if we had the originals printing costs have risen and it might be uneconomic.

I’ve just completed scanning the Bishops’ Registers as they had gone out of print, and these are now available as PDFs on CD-ROM via GENfair here. Apart from keeping the information available there is an additional benefit for our customers in that we can make both publications available on a single disk at the same price that one of the printed books was sold for.

Irish Catholic registers to go online July 8th

03 Sunday May 2015

Posted by Lawrence Gregory in Church Records, Libraries

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Ireland, Irish

Although as a society we focus on England, Scotland, and Wales many of us have ancestors and so this will be of interest – thanks to http://britishgenes.blogspot.com/ for bringing this to my attention.

Note that it says they will not be indexed – so you will probably have to know the parish name, and as my ancestors tended just to say Ireland and not be more specific I wonder how much use they will be to me. I suspect that one of the big online suppliers will come to some arrangement with the NLI to index them.

National Library of Ireland Announces Launch Date for New Online Genealogy Resource

– Almost 400,000 images of Catholic parish register microfilms to be available online for free from 8th July 2015 –

The entire collection of Catholic parish register microfilms held by the National Library of Ireland (NLI) will be made available online – for free – from 8th July 2015 onwards. On that date, a dedicated website will go live, with over 390,000 digital images of the microfilm reels on which the parish registers are recorded.

The NLI has been working to digitise the microfilms for over three years under its most ambitious digitisation programme to date.

The parish register records are considered the single most important source of information on Irish family history prior to the 1901 Census. Dating from the 1740s to the 1880s, they cover 1,091 parishes throughout the island of Ireland, and consist primarily of baptismal and marriage records.

Commenting today, the NLI’s Ciara Kerrigan, who is managing the digitisation of the parish registers, said:

“We announced initial details of this project last December, and received a hugely enthusiastic response from people worldwide with an interest in Irish family history. We are delighted to announce that the project has been progressing well, and we will be able to publish all the digitised records online from 8th July onwards.

“This is the most significant ever genealogy project in the history of the NLI. The microfilms have been available to visitors to the NLI since the 1970s. However, their digitisation means that, for the first time, anyone who likes will be able to access these registers without having to travel to Dublin.”

Typically, the parish registers include information such as the dates of baptisms and marriages, and the names of the key people involved, including godparents or witnesses. The digital images of the registers will be searchable by parish location only, and will not be transcribed or indexed by the NLI.

“The images will be in black and white, and will be of the microfilms of the original registers,” explained Ms. Kerrigan. “There will not be transcripts or indexes for the images. However, the nationwide network of local family history centres holds indexes and transcripts of parish registers for their local areas. So those who access our new online resource will be able to cross-reference the information they uncover, and identify wider links and connections to their ancestral community by also liaising with the relevant local family history centre.”

The NLI is planning an official launch event for the new online resource on 8th July. Further details will be available in the coming weeks.

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