This month Family Tree Academy Tutor, David Annal, explores records of death and demonstrates the clues they may reveal
We’ve already looked at official records of births in England and Wales (in the April 2023 issue) and marriages (in June 2023). Now it’s time to switch the focus to records of deaths and their pre-civil registration equivalent, burial records.
Expect the bare minimum until 1813
When it comes to genealogical detail, records of deaths and burials have always been the poor cousins of births, baptisms and marriages. For about 270 years, starting in 1538, when parish registers began to be kept by the Church of England, until 1813, when pre-printed burial registers were introduced under the terms of Rose’s Parish Register Act, it was usual for just the bare minimum details to be recorded. In fact, in pre-18th century registers, you’re more likely than not to find just the name of the deceased together with the date of their burial in the Church of England’s parish burial registers.
Even well into the 19th century, it’s not at all uncommon to come across registers with page-after-page of entries like this. The parish of St Mary, Portsea in Hampshire provides us with a good example; between October 1789 and December 1800, nearly 8,000 burials were recorded in the bustling maritime parish over 140 pages of the register; the only additional identifying feature attached to any of the records is the occasional entry reading ‘Poor’ or ‘Pauper’ or sometimes just the letter ‘P’. We’ll look at the significance of such entries in a moment.
It’s really not hard to see that identifying specific ancestors in records like this can be extremely challenging if not impossible.
But it's not all bad news!
Thankfully, however, some vicars and parish clerks realised the importance of providing a bit more detail, such as the ‘residence’ of the deceased, which might be the name of a specific farm or perhaps the name of the village, hamlet or district in which the deceased had lived might be given. Particularly in the larger northern parishes, it’s not at all unusual to see the name of the township or chapelry within the parish recorded. Increasingly, you might even find the deceased’s occupation or, best of all, their age.
A patriarchal tone
The patriarchal nature of the society in which our ancestors lived is reflec
