Jan 2010
Our expert Stephen Rigden answers your questions:
After receiving a copy of my great-grandmother’s death certificate I thought it would be an easy thing to find her burial place so that I can visit from Australia next year. However, I have come up against a problem I have no idea how to tackle - I am unfamiliar with the areas around Bournemouth and with the changes to Hampshire and Dorset boundaries so do not know where to begin.
She died in Winton, Hampshire in 1903 from the effects of TB at aged 32 - her name was Ellen Dean (nee Boyt), wife of Charles. I have made enquiries with libraries but there is no record of her burial in the Bournemouth area and I am at a loss to know where to try - surely there must be a register which would record all burials for the County? Any advice would be gratefully received.’ Kris
Steve says:”Unfortunately, no! There are no such things as countywide burial registers in England and Wales.
Registration of deaths occurs locally at district register offices, with records then being collated centrally into a nationwide index. It is true that in civil registration there is an ongoing move towards unitary authorities sited at county level: for example, Kent County Council has a single countywide Registration Services portal. However, this does not apply to burials and cremations.
Unlike deaths, burials have never been regarded by the state as a vital event requiring systematic registration of date and place. Therefore, once a death has been registered, and assuming certain regulations are followed, burial can take place in a cemetery (or other approved location) of one’s choice.
Back in 1903, therefore, your late great grandmother’s death was registered in Christchurch registration district, which covered both Winton and Bournemouth. This is the only guide to place of burial that you have: most burials take place close to the locality of residence and death where these are the same. However, it is not hard to imagine situations where these general guidelines are broken. For example, if a person died far from their usual place of abode (for instance, while on holiday, or travelling), they may have been buried not near the place of death but back in their home district. Similarly, it is not unusual for a person who left their home town to be buried back there, especially if all other family remained in that location. Of course, neither of these scenarios may apply in your case, but do check on the death certificate for any addresses given for the deceased and/or the informant.
If it does seem that your great grandmother both lived and died in the Christchurch registration district area, you find yourself in a position shared by many genealogists: you know where an ancestor died but you will have to search speculatively to try to identify the place of burial. It was precisely to help out researchers in your predicament that the Federation of Family History Societies embarked upon its ongoing National Burial Index (NBI) project. A version of the NBI is online, containing 13 million entries, at Find My Past and can be found at http://www.findmypast.co.uk/parish-records-collection-search-start.action?redef=0&event=D. Currently, however, there are only limited records for Hampshire and, unfortunately, none of relevance to you.
This leaves you with only one option: to identify all the municipal and church burial grounds in the area active in 1903 and to eliminate them one by one, working out from the centre to more distant locations. As you are based in Australia and do not benefit from local knowledge, I suggest that your best step would be to contact the relevant family history society, in this instance Hampshire Genealogical Society for advice. Their contact page http://www.hgs-online.org.uk/contacts.htm includes email addresses for local organisers. They may also be able to recommend a local expert willing to undertake enquiries upon your behalf; such searches may be necessary at the County Record Office and could take in funeral notices in local newspapers for the two weeks after death, as well as burial registers.
Finally, as a word of caution, it is worth noting that if and when you successfully identify the place of burial, it is possible that you will find no surviving headstone in situ – one may not have been raised in the first place, or it may have become weathered and damaged over time. In this regard, those local authorities most mindful of health and safety regulations often lay down headstones which they deem to be dangerous.”
We hope this is useful to your research. If you would like to pose a question for Steve, please register or opt to receive newsletters in My Account.
I come from Bournemouth. The most likely burial place If the address is in Winton would be the cemetery at cemetery junction on the corner of Wimborne Road and Charminster Road. It is on the edge of Winton. Otherwise there is St Peters Church which is in the town centre. If you contact them they will check their records for you.
St.Marks Talbot Village is another possibility as this would be closer for some parts of Winton.
Telephone or Write to Bournemouth Bereavemnet Services, they are very helpful, I did and they found my Grandmothers Burial details and her Grave Plot/Number and they do not charge for this service, which I think is excellent.
Thanks to them I was able to go to her last resting place.
Ellen
A useful source of death / burial information are the BMD columns of local papers. Check if LDS has these on microfilm for the town / date you are interested in, if they have then order them to view at your Local LDS Family History Centre.
I don’t know whether there is any connection but my wife’s family knew of a Mr Dean in the Winton/Moordown area of Bournemouth in the period before the war. Mr Dean (I don’t know his first name) lived in Strouden Road. THis extends to Charminster Road and then continues as Stouden Avenue past the North Cemetery and crematorium. I don’t know when this opened but If your Ellen Dean was related she might have been buried here. Sue’s family had shops in the area from around 1915 to 1970, first in Muscliffe Road and then Evelyn Road. Mr Dean kept a pony and trap. He used to take Sue’s grandfather to market at Wimborne and also took the family to the beach at Sandbanks on Sundays. If there is a family connection I could provide Kris with photos of Mr Dean in his trap and outside his house, if you can put him in touch with me. Photo dates are unknown but probably 1920s or 1930s. He was fairly elderly then so possibly contemporary with Ellen. He was also married at the time.
Jim Malpuss
As a family history researcher based in Australia I constantly turn to my copy of the “AA Road Atlas of Great Britain” to locate places named in records. For example this helps me to identify the most likely places where BMD are registered, therefore helping me to sort through duplicate names in BMD records.
I bought my maps in UK but assume that Australian researchers could purchase copies through major book retailers.
In preparing for a trip to UK to follow up family history in UK the maps are also an invaluable planning resource as they are on a very large scale and cover almost every village and town in UK.
Laele ( Victoria, Australia)
Did you attend UHS as Laele Cox?
St Johns Church Moordown would be a good place to search as it is in Winton.
I am looking for my birth mother (I am aged 52), I have all details, which the adoption agency gave me 25 years ago. My mother’s name was Marion Godseau. I saw in the internet that a Marion Godseau died in Bournemouth on 09/07 2010. How can I access the death registry for this person? Thanks
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