Church and Churchyard Memorials
Nothing is more frustrating when researching past family members than to arrive at a church only to find that a huge array of randomly organised gravestones awaits examination! Some digitisation of our grave memorials is available already online and eventually most memorials will be searchable via The National Burial Grounds Survey. However, there is very limited phone signal at St. Hugh’s and some memorials will not have been available to the surveyors so it was decided to go ahead with a ‘manual’ memorial location tool.
The starting points were a card index of memorial inscriptions and a very faded map showing the location of all the gravestones but no tie-in to names. The memorial inscriptions were entered into a spreadsheet and ‘clean’ copies of the map were produced. Then followed many hours methodically matching each stone or other memorial in the church and graveyard to a spreadsheet entry. There were lots of anomalies, as well as missing information, so historical sources such as Bishops’ Transcripts on OPC-Cornwall and other records on genealogy websites were used for cross-referencing. Broken, displaced stones were mostly identified – think jigsaw but no picture!
There is now in St. Hugh’s a folder containing plans of the church and churchyard with the location of every known memorial marked and cross referenced numerically with an alphabetical list of names. Full instructions are given as to how a memorial can be found. There is also a list of memorials known to be in the church in Victorian times but no longer visible.
Use the links below to access the information available in St. Hugh’s (excluding the location plans):
