burials of stillborn and infants at Rookwood Cemetery NSW

[Katharine75]

I am posting this in the hope it may help someone in a similar situation....

My grandmother's first pregnancy sadly ended with her giving birth to stillborn twin girls in 1947. The policy of the day was to whisk the babies away from the mother so she could move on with her life.
My grandparents did not get to see their babies, or name them, or have anything to do with their burials. Despite this my grandmother remembers having being asked to pay the 1 pound fee for burial (2 pounds in her case since she had twins). She went on to have six more healthy children.

When looking into this for her a number of years ago, I was able to get the medical records from the Women's Hospital at Paddington, and applied for the babies death certificates.
This showed they were buried in Rookwood in the RC section.

I had contacted the cemetery at the time only to be told they were in an unmarked mass grave - and it was left at that.

Recently I had been on the cemetery website (as they now have burials searchable online!) looking for something else, and by chance decided to put in the surname and found the actual grave number.

We visited there yesterday and found where they are buried. We also discovered that people are now able to put a plaque on the grave for their 'lost' children, which my grandmother intends to do. So after 65 years of being 'lost' they are now found! She was so elated to find her babies. She often wondered about them, and with a lot of negative reports in the media about secret adoptions etc, was worried that something terrible could have happened.

Hope this helps someone become reunited with their baby.

[maggbill]

Lovely conclusion to your story!  And what a joy for your grandmother!  Thanks for sharing it with us..

[dawnsh]

That's such a happy ending to a sad story that has blighted your family for the best part of 60 years and people stumbling across this topic in future will be given hope that their searches can be solved.

The fact that the cemetery are allowing plaques shows there has been a change in attitudes (for the better) to the historic burials of stillborn, premature and neonatal deaths.

[Katharine75]

Thankyou for your thoughts on my grandmother's story. We did organise a plaque, and take her there to visit every year. Although they were never named on their NSW certificates, the cemetery did allow her to choose names to put on the plaque - which she happily did. 

[Berrie]

I was interested to read about your experiences of tracing records of stillborn children. My great aunt lived in Sydney and apparently had two children between 1902 and 1909 but both died. She wasn't married to their father although she used his surname and I haven't been able to find birth or death records for them using either surname. I wondered if they were stillborn but have no idea how to find out what happened to them.

[Katharine75]

Hi Berrie. Glad you found it of interest. If you can't find the births or deaths under either surname with variant spellings, it is possible they could be under another surname or not registered at all. For different time periods, the law was different. Going on memory, I think I read somewhere on stillbirths...you might find only the birth registered, or only the death, or both. Again, going on memory the law also varied over the decades as to how many weeks gestation was considered a stillborn (for example the stillbirth might occur at 34 weeks, but the law might have said 36 weeks or more was a legal birth, in which case no documentation was necessary as it would have been considered a 'miscarriage').
If something like this happened with your aunt, then maybe their might be hospital records or burial records only to discover.
The Royal Women's Hospital Paddington had an archive department which I contacted for my Nan's medical record from the 40s.
Hope you this helps you further. Katharine.

[Berrie]

Thanks for replying. I will try to access the archives.