‘I always knew that one set of my great-grandparents was buried in Undercliffe Cemetery but had no idea where – and with more than 23,000 graves and around 124,000 burials, finding ancestors in this Victorian burial ground is like searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack,’ writes Gaynor Haliday…
FINDING FAMILY GRAVESBRADFORD’S UNDERCLIFFE CEMETERY:
Although headstones can be a great source of information for family historians (and who doesn’t love pottering round a cemetery or graveyard?), what can we do when a headstone is illegible, inaccessible, vanished, or never existed in the first place? Even where a legible headstone can be found, it doesn’t necessarily follow that all those interred in a plot are recorded on it. How does anyone find just where their ancestors are buried?
Fortunately for me, I spotted a Facebook request for family historians to join Undercliffe Cemetery’s research team and jumped at the opportunity to investigate the records. That was back in 2018. Little did I know what rabbit hole of research I was entering and what I’d discover!
Undercliffe Cemetery’s history
Undercliffe Cemetery (www. undercliffecemetery.co.uk) was provisionally registered as the Bradford Cemetery Company in 1849 by a group of leading businessmen. Not only was it a necessary amenity but it was designed to be a profitable enterprise. It received its licence to operate in 1852, shares were issued and a suitable site was sought. The right parcel of land became available, an estate being sold by a wealthy Quaker family, on the outskirts of the burgeoning town. In all, 26 acres of land (incorporating farm buildings) were purchased for £3,400 and work began. The project, designed by William Gay and John Dale (architect), was budgeted at £12,000. Grounds were laid out with ornamental planting and shrubberies (partly to separate the lower-class graves from those of the more affluent) and buildings constructed: a house and office for the registrar; lodges for the gardener and sexton; and two wooden mortuary chapels (replaced with stone buildings in 1878), one for Anglicans and the other for Dissenters. The existing farm buildings were put to good use for the monumental stonemason’s premises.
In the centre was an elliptical area, the central (now referred to as the historic) core, where the great and good (and generally wealthy) were interred. A promenade ran across the south end
