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Beginners => Family History Beginners Board => Topic started by: jane camp on Sunday 27 May 18 20:38 BST (UK)
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although a baby who was stillborn in 1906 was not registered. What happened to them. Is there a grave? How do I find out
thank you
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I believe that for many, many years, up until about the 1960s in the UK stillborn babies were put in communal graves, often with no funeral service. This is so sad because many bereaved parents were never able to come to terms with their loss, as the baby would be taken away from the mother, often without the parents even having held their child. It is also likely that they might not even have been told where their baby had been buried.
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Oh, and please forgive my manners, Jane - welcome to Rootschat!
Regards
GS
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Welcome to Rootschat.
They were also sometimes placed in the coffin of someone who happened to die and be buried around the same time.
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If you are lucky there might be a mention of them in the burial registers (you'd have to guess cemeteries local to either the house or the local hospital) but a lot of the time they simply weren't recorded. Even if they are there, as something like "Stillborn son/dau of..." or "Infant of..." you might not get a grave reference, and this note might only be added if the parents arranged the burial rather than a midwife or hospital attendant. Your only real chance in that case would be if there was, as Jebber says, another burial on the same day and that grave might be identified by a headstone or reference, not that it means for sure that the child is in there. I think stillbirths were more often not recorded at all. The idea at the time was "forget this one, make a new one".
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Don't discount the possibility of a burial record. I was hunting for a deceased child and eventually came to the conclusion that he/she had been stillborn.
When I was looking at the burial records on Deceased Online I did come across a few burials that had been recorded as SBC. Just had the surname and the cemetery in which the baby had been buried.
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I had a baby brother who was stillborn in 1956,he is buried in the cemetery in Watford. The people in the office at the cemetery looked up his burial for us.They told us my parent's never attended his funeral.I have been there to see his grave and all grassed over.
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Toxteth burials online,state still born child of and mothers name,so some did put details in the records others did not,
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I was told at a records office that stillborns and babies who died a little after birth often weren't registered anywhere. For a few pence the gravediggers would bury the baby in the next grave to be used and a coffin was then placed over the baby's burial place. What was important to the parents was the baby was in consecrated ground.
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Thank you GS that was very informative. it is really sad. so my search goes on.
thank you
Jane
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Hi and welcome to rootschat ;D
Years ago I remember a conversation I had with my mother in law when I first started research, she told me of a sibling of hers which was still born, not registered and was buried in a grave of 'someone' who had died and was being buried... her story continued that she would go with her parents to this grave to lay flowers but she couldn't remember the person whose grave it was, so without her story I would never have known of the stillbirth sibling of hers.
In my own maternal line my I found out my great grandfather was previously married (no one knew) and he had 5 children one of which survived and my grandmother thought it was her older sister ( not older half sister) the other 4 ( 1879-1886) one stillbirth, no birth/death reg, but there is a burial record and the other three died 1 hour to 16 weeks old and they were registered birth/death and burials.
How sad! I just wish my grandmother had still been here so I could have told her about her dads previous marriage, her older half sibling and the 4 who died