Overgrown churchyards

[Guy Etchells]

Slightly off topic, our church needed work done around the exterior of the building to stop damp getting in around the base.  A group of retired engineers from the village got together and worked out how to do this and carried out the excavations. In doing so they unearthed quite a lot of skeletons - people who had been buried as close to the church as possible without a grave and with no known names.  A large new grave was dug and consecrated to our unknown parishioners and a local  joiner made a fine cross to go above the grave.  It was agreed that the skeletons had received a dignified burial. 

You have me puzzled here, you say the "people who had been buried as close to the church as possible without a grave", obviously they had graves as they were buried, I take it you mean their graves were not recorded?
Many old churches did not record early burials in a book, the verger kept the records in his head and unfortunately when he died the records were lost. When I started visiting graveyards in the 1950s as a boy I was amazed these old verger could take us to the various graves, some were later burial recorded in the burial register but some were unrecorded burials. I still mourn the passing of those men who where living encyclopedias of the churchyard.
Cheers
Guy

[GrahamSimons]

Our parish's burial register goes back to 1559. There are just short of 10,000 entries in our registers, and burials would have been taking place for many centuries before 1559. It's only in the 20th century that records were kept of where the graves are located; we have around 700 headstones, some of which were moved to the margins of the churchyard under a Faculty in the later 20th century. It's a fair guess that 15,000 are buried in our churchyard and we know the locations of only a few hundred.

While numbers will differ, I'm sure the general principles will apply to most rural parsh churchyards.

[Gillg]

I can only repeat what I was told by one of the retired engineers who discovered and reburied the old skeletons.  He said that people in past times wanted to be buried as close to the church as possible.  Although their deaths would have been recorded in old parish registers, no indication of their actual graves was found.  We have a very good archivist in the local history society, but she was unable to find further information about the dead.  Possibly they were paupers, do you think?

[louisa maud]

I don’t know about that   Gillg but I know my church 's register  has a lot missing from years ago, perhaps they weren't so  good at record  keeping in days  gone  by,  I always thought the nearer the church they  were  buried  the person  was  of  some  note.
I would have thought paupers  or  not they would  have  been recorded.

LM

[Top-of-the-hill]

  Graham Simons, reply 37.
     I made a similar comment in the other thread running on Totally off topic, reply 18, only I was slightly less polite!