Finding a grave - Mary Jane Marsh 1913

[Hilary]

Your earlier post about the reply from Cheshire Archives only mentions them checking their memorial inscriptions. Did you ask them to check for a burial? There may never have been a gravestone so she wouldn't show up in the memorial inscriptions.

[Marshy77]

Thats part of the problem, Cheshire Archives have said that the problem with monumental inscriptions lists is that they only list what headstones the compiler sees when visiting the graveyard and that if my ancestor had no headstone or no inscription or if the headstone has been weathered beyond legibility or taken down for safety reasons then they will not appear on the list. Plus the closing of the church yard and relocating of many of the graves to the cemetery has complicated matters a great deal in the case of St Elphin's.
He said he could find no reference to the grave i was looking for and the church warden said that they were no longer allowed to keep records at the church because of storage issues so they passed to the Archives. So the question is who has the burial records if anyone!

[Hilary]

Burial Registers are not the same as Monumental registers.

This is from Cheshire Record Office Catalogue


P 316 - Warrington St Elphin parish records
Repository
Cheshire Record Office
Level
Collection (Fonds)
Reference
P 316
Title
Warrington St Elphin parish records
Date
16th century-20th century

Description

Registers: Christenings 1591-1985, Marriages 1591-1984, Burials 1591-1968. The records also include records of church schools, records relating to church property and charities, Warrington Ladies' School of Industry, Warrington Training College and of Mission Churches within the parish.


Cheshire Record Office do hold the burial registers. The entry may tell you very little more than was found on www.familysearch.org You already know there is no gravestone. It would appear that any graveyard record showing the position of graves has been lost. This is true of many churches.

[Marshy77]

Thankyou Hilary, i will send those details back to them just to double check, quite gutted i will probably never know.

[Tex T]

Perhaps I am missing something here, but are you assuming that because the funeral service was held at St Elphin then the burial must also have taken place there as well?

I would suggest that the burial was more likely to have been at the municipal cemetery in Manchester Road Warrington. This was opened in 1857 for, I expect, the same reason that the municipal cemetery in Widnes was opened 1898, because the graveyards associated with the local churches could no longer cope with the number of burials needed.

Lan-opc have so far transcribed (for 1653 to 1854) 47986 burials for the graveyard at St Elphin, and if you look at the size of the graveyard it is clear that each plot would have had to have been reused many times. I don’t know when burials stopped at St Elphin (is there anyone from the Warrington Group on the forum who could answer this question?) but I would imagine that the only burials taking place at St Elphin after the municipal cemetery opened would be in plots that had “recently” been started and which still had allocated space. I know that Jan44 has searched on here,

http://www.warrington.gov.uk/info/20074 ... al_records

for the burial with no success, but do we know how comprehension this database is?

For an indication of the problems in church graveyards at this time see pages 6 and 7 in the link below which is a history of All Saints in Runcorn.

http://www.runcornhistsoc.org.uk/runcor ... church.pdf

[MaryA]

I don’t know when burials stopped at St Elphin (is there anyone from the Warrington Group on the forum who could answer this question?)

Have made an enquiry regarding this, if anybody has an answer hopefully we will get a response, otherwise again it may be a question to pose to the church or the library, or even Cheshire Archives where the Burial Records are held, but looking at Hilary's information it does seem that they may have continued well into the 20th Century.