Deceased Online is “the first central database of statutory burial and cremation registers for the UK and Republic of Ireland – a unique resource for family history researchers and professional genealogists.” Launched in 2008, Deceased Online already has more than 5 million records from over 30 cemeteries and crematoriums online, and consistently wins awards as one of the best UK web sites for family history.

The site will help you locate the place of burial or cremation for those who died after the 1850s. This is the time at which the likelihood of your ancestor being buried in a small parish churchyard considerably diminished in favour of their likely interment in a sprawling council cemetery. And because English death certifi cates for the late 19th and early 20th century don’t show the place of burial or cremation, it’s often very diffi cult to locate this information.

The site offers a free search, which can be as little as just a surname or restricted by including a given name, date range and region. The results screen will show the full name of the deceased, their date of death and details of where they were buried/cremated, and which authority administers that site. In many instances, this will be sufficient information for the genealogist and can help to eliminate more recent generations.

More detailed information, including digitised scans of burial and cremation registers, can be acquired from the site for a fee by purchasing ‘pay to view’ credits. The minimum purchase is 30 credits and most searches require 15 credits, which equates to Pound 1.50 or about $2.40. For this you get a digitised image of the actual burial entry, which may provide additional information such as who arranged the funeral and where the deceased lived. Other documentation, such as a map showing the location of a burial (50 credits or Pound 5) or a photograph of a memorial (20 credits or Pound 2) are also available for some cemeteries. Credits currently last for six months.

Burial records in the UK are public documents, but cremation records aren’t. The usual cost of accessing records such as these varies according to the cemetery or cremation authority – some may give free access while others have been known to charge up to Pound 40 to undertake a single name search! It’s hoped that eventually the records of more than 3,000 different authorities and 250 crematoriums in the UK will be added to this sited, so researchers will only have to consult one searchable database.

Coverage is limited at present and researchers should check the list of available records to establish if the site will be of use to their specific search. For example, the London Borough of Camden has 470,000 records on the site, Cambridge City Council has 175,000 and Edinburgh Crematorium has 313,000. Others have smaller listings – Collompton in Devon has 6,300 entries and Sawston Parish Council in Cambridge has 1,892. However, there are some exciting additions on the way, with 1.7 million new records being digitised at present and a further 1.9 million in the pipeline, while negotiations are in hand to add nearly 7.1 million records from another 57 council authorities to the site. Even so, these figures are still quite small when compared with the estimated 100 million burial and cremation records that have been created in the UK since the last half of the nineteenth century.

Many records relate to quite recent deaths and for this reason some details may be restricted, as Deceased Online must comply with the UK Data Protection Act, which requires that the details of living, or potentially living, people aren’t publicly accessible. For this reason, details of the applicant for a funeral, a grave owner, doctor or person officiating at a funeral may not be available for up to 75 years. The address and place of death of the deceased is normally not made available for 15 years.

Source: Australian PC User, November 1, 2011