Searching for a woman!

[Olde Crone Holden]

Sorry Margaret, my question was addressed to Thetallone! I see no reason for the council to lie to him, they merely have to say the stone was removed because it was dangerous - they would have done nothing wrong, so no reason to lie and say there wasn't a stone at all.

I made the point upthread that maybe there WAS a stone, but not where you think it was, and that your mother saw the stone on someone else's grave, another member of the family.

OC

[Thetallone]

Why on earth would they lie?

OC

Well, the council bereavement service say emphatically that no headstone is ever removed from the cemetery or indeed a grave. The have said this both verbally and in writing. That may well be the case now and they may claim that it has always been the case. It seems doubtful that this is true.

In the 70's when genealogy was not so easy ( no Internet etc) not so many people bothered, the council had a "cavalier attitude to headstones" see my thread on Sheff. Hist.Forum "stolen headstones?". When a member says that his neighbour had a rockery made of pieces of headstones with visible inscriptions on them, and that vandalism was rife at thiat time and in that particular cemetery, it beggars belief that the council is telling the truth. There might be a public outcry if the truth were revealed so it's easier to say thet their records show there was never a headstone there. There was, my mother remembers it, and the council are lieing!

If I were that bothered, I'd ask a lot more potentially embarrassing questions of the council but that would not give me sight of Elizabeth's headstone and the inscription on it which is what I wanted. I don't want a drawn out fight with the council just to prove a point.

Kev

[Olde Crone Holden]

Why would they lie and say there was never a headstone though.

Yes, I can show you lots of stuff made from rubble headstones. They were not deliberately removed and sold to people to make their rockeries though, they were stones which were broken in the normal course of events, or indeed by vandalism. What would you expect the groundsmen to do with such rubble, keep it in a pile for perpetuity?

You do seem to think there was some sort of conspiracy going on. I doubt it very much, if only for the reason that forty years ago, there may not have been any internet, but people were much more likely to care for family graves and a missing headstone would have been noticed almost immediately. Having said that, the Council cannot be blamed if thieves steal headstones for people to make patios out of - shame on the thieves, shame on the buyers.

Is your mother absolutely sure that the headstone she saw with an inscription on it was there and not somewhere else, i.e. another family member's grave. How long is it since she visited that grave?

OC

[Janet in Yorkshire]

Surely council bereavement services are a relatively new initiative? I wonder who dealt with enquiries prior to their inception?
I suspect that there may have been several changes of "power" post 1950, which may well have affected the overall control and record keeping for Sheffield cemeteries.
With regard to my bit of Yorkshire, there were several administrative changes between the 1960's and the 1990's - each brought in "new" organisations, new methods and new paperwork systems. It is alleged that each change initiated new paper chains and filing systems, which sometimes resulted in prior paperwork becoming "lost" - there were no procedures as to what to do with it, clerks were snowed under and rapid changes of staff resulted in old papers being "lost."
What we don't know is what kind of records were kept since the early days of the cemetery and which records were later additions. i.e IF a stone had been erected following the first burial, would this have been recorded at that time, where and by whom?
My local church burial register records who was interred in the churchyard and when. The burial plan (separate document) tells me where they were interred. Neither tells me whether or not a gravestone was erected. The only indication of stones (apart from a physical walk round) is a booklet of memorial inscriptions compiled by the local family history group - however, this only records the stones visible when they carried out their project; it does not include stones erected after that date, or stones which had fallen over (or wooden markers which had rotted) before that date.

Jay

[Olde Crone Holden]

Jay

I have the original receipt for my great great grandparents' grave, which was purchased in 1881, and a second receipt dated mid-1920s for the headstone whch was then erected (family fortunes on the up!) including the permission of the cemetery for the stone to be erected. This was the municipal cemetery in Philips Park, Manchester. So at least one municipal cemetery was keeping (and still has) records from the 1880s. Incidentally, the tenure of the grave was 80 years, after which they can do what they like with it, but as far as I know, the grave and stone are still there.

OC

[margaretmarch]

One of the things I found out about cemetery records is that they don't always exist in the neat format we would expect. One of my ancestors is buried in Bunhill Cemetery in London which has some famous people in it and is therefore on the tourist route.

I went there to see my ancestor's grave and hopefully see a headstone as I had a record from elsewhere that he had been buried there and even had the co-ordinates of his grave. When I got there the cemetery keeper was lovely man but all he had by way of records was a hand drawn plan (by him) of the graves and their numbers, which along with his knowledge of the layout enabled him to pinpoint where my ancestor may have been buried using the info I had.

The biggest problem was that during the Blitz many of the stones had been destroyed and of those that remained many were worn smooth, so no idea who was buried there.

I doubt it is a priority by Councils to improve their records when there is so much pressure on resources for other more immediate things to be done for the living.

There are so many factors at play in these cases that it is difficult to pinpoint any particular reason for lack of details or mis-information which I am sure would not be deliberate.

Margaret

[Olde Crone Holden]

Oh, now this is interesting! Remember the discussion we had upthread about numbered corrections to certificates? I said there was a corrections book, the local RO told Thetallone that there wasn't. Well here is a photocopy of a corrected certificate, with the correction numbered as "17". It most certainly isn't the 17th correction on that certificate, so why is it so numbered?

http://www.lostcousins.com/newsletters/jun14news.htm

OC

[Darksecretz]

Oh, now this is interesting! Remember the discussion we had upthread about numbered corrections to certificates? I said there was a corrections book, the local RO told Thetallone that there wasn't. Well here is a photocopy of a corrected certificate, with the correction numbered as "17". It most certainly isn't the 17th correction on that certificate, so why is it so numbered?

http://www.lostcousins.com/newsletters/jun14news.htm

OC

I understand what you are saying OC, maybe there was a huge error in this case though [which is why it is numbered 1-4]?

don't suppose we'll ever know!

[Olde Crone Holden]

No, it isn't important now, but it points up the likelihood of a corrections book, when the local RO told Thetallone there isn't one.

OC