In my last post, I shared my daughter’s discovery of the gravestone of my 4 x great grandparents, George and Elizabeth Kemp, while on holiday in West Yorkshire over the summer. We found it in the churchyard of St John the Evangelist in Oulton.
On returning home, I decided to see if I could find the burial records online – Ancestry now have a huge swathe of West Yorkshire records on their site1.
I found a record for George Kemp in 1882, and noticed some interesting annotations in his entry:
Burial record of George Kemp, 1882 - detail
I checked pages 130 and 161 of the register and found the following entries:
Burial record of Elizabeth Kemp, 1890 - detail
Burial record of Thomas Kemp, 1895 - detail
I guessed that the “No.74” on each record was related to their shared grave site. Searching back through the register to the first page, I found the following annotations:
Burial Register, St John the Evangelist, Oulton - detail
This is what I can make out from the text:
The numbers in red are the numbers of the graves as shown on the Plan of the Graves in the Churchyard
“No. ” […] inserted by H[?]
[….] have added all the graves I know, up to [1839? 1939?] without the “No. “
So, there was a Plan! I wonder where it is now?