When I was a kid, there was little I enjoyed more on a rainy day than a jigsaw puzzle, almost certainly with the nascent Radio One for company. The jigsaws had to be small. I either had to finish them on my drawing board or the kitchen table. For younger readers, a drawing board was a flat piece of wood that sat on the the arms of your chair over your lap, and on which you could write, draw maps, construct model military aircraft or do small jigsaws. It was laptop 1.0. If you started a puzzle on the kitchen table, you had to be done by dinner or tea time. Never on laundry or baking days. Now I do virtual jigsaws online. What purists would call the architypes, sit in boxes in the loft.
The reason I mention this is a confession to my attraction to an unholy mess and making a pattern out of it. Much of my time now, by choice, is spent wallowing in the statutory records that cemeteries are supposed to keep. I say supposed to keep. There is a legal requirement to record some very specific facts, in a very specific matter when a human body is buried. There must registers of interments, purchases, graves, exhumations and body parts. Details of the deceased have to include the place and date of death and the home address. There has to be a plan of the graves in the cemetery. There’s more.
The records we have inherited have passed through many hands, some of whom knew what they were doing. Those that did have left us a rich history of our cities, towns and villages, the others have left us jigsaw pieces.
We live in a unique period in history as far as those records that have survived are concerned. For the last 170 years they have mostly been held in heavily bound registers on shelves in offices; for the rest of history as we can imagine it, they will sit in the cloud. What I do and help people to do, is to transfer the written lines, analogue to digital. It is an education.
You have to remember that as you proceed, someone’s memory has passed through your mind, possibly for the first time in anybody living’s thoughts for half a century; perhaps for the last time ever. As you work through the years, the stories of families emerge. In the brief time taken you can start to have some sort of appreciation of a life lived long ago, how a town, a community worked.
Most of all, you learn about the registrar, clerk to the council in most cases. They could be there for decades. Their signature is a statutory requirement. If you haven’t deciphered their name in the first hundred records, you never will. Some were diligent and filled in every detail in an easily read script, others less so. Some forgot the date of burial, some omit the day of the month, some even the month. You have to guess at somewhere between the last and next date you have. Very often the date of death and burial are duplicated. Occasionally, someone thinks it not necessary to mention which grave someone’s been buried in. Ownership details maybe name and town only, everybody knew him.
Worst of all is the cryptic note, typically written 50 years after the original record and 60 years until you read it. Against grave, let’s say A129, it may say, ‘possibly B135’. ?? Details please. My favourite, and a record I kept on my desk for many years in my last job as a cemetery manager, was one of the 250,000+ index cards I’d inherited. Detective work told me I could pretty much be certain it had been misfiled in 1912, We only came across it as we scanned the records and began the transfer to digital. The card was partially filled in, I believe it had a deceased’s record but no grave. In pencil across the card were written neatly the words, ‘details to follow’. I kept it on my desk with faith in my confident predecessor. Not wanting to change tradition I have to admit I’ve inserted some hopefully enigmatic comments into records that may not be seen for a decade or so. ‘Biscuits’ was a favourite insertion in the notes section. Have fun 23rdcentury registrar.
In the process of transcribing records, we generally work backwards; more recent records are more useful. Older records can be far more interesting in many respects. They tell us so much about who we were. I’m currently working on a set of records where the almost exclusive entry for a woman’s occupation was her marital status. A 17 year old girl that died was described as a ‘spinster’, a label I’ve always found used pejoratively having grown up with a generation of maiden aunts whose should have been husbands were blown apart in Flanders. Men in their 80s are ‘Labourers’.
A burial register for which I once I had responsibility in a small town cemetery in Devon, had a well filled ‘comments’ column. Here the registrar felt free to add an editorial. A child of 7 died, he commented, ‘after long neglect by his parents’. Another, ‘Stillborn child of ‘Jane Doe’ and ‘John Smith’ or ‘William Jones’ or ‘Charles Brown’ or other’. Food for thought.
I’ve written the records of the consequences of a V2 rocket bound for the East End falling short in Kent and taking out a home for refugee children from the East End. There’s a grave in Exeter’s Higher cemetery that contains ‘a tangled mass of humanity’. There was a fire at a theatre newly fitted with the latest turnstile gates at the exit. A few hundred yards away is the trench burial site of the victims of the blitz. Not far away are the graves of young Polish boys who died defending our city and also of young German boys they shot down. There’s a rich history in our cemeteries.
Digitisation is a twin bladed sword. Records are secure when scanned and easily accessible when digitised. However, when all records from all sources are combined, every error made in up to 170 years is laid bare. Inevitably in the public eye, this will be the responsibility of the current custodian who has only committed the crime of exposing the truth.
There will always be pieces missing in 170 year old jigsaw puzzles, we are not responsible for what we have inherit.
Ian Quance
Resident Author
