Research your ancestors’ memorial inscriptions from a selection of cemeteries in the Folkestone area of East Kent.
Research your ancestors’ memorial inscriptions from a selection of cemeteries in the Folkestone area of East Kent.
The detail in each record varies by burial ground but generally you may expect to see at least the following information:
Usually, there will be either a year of birth or a recorded age at death, from which we will have calculated approximate year of birth.
Monumental (or memorial) inscriptions supplement death and burial registers in that (usually) they provide evidence of the place of interment of an individual. The following burial grounds are covered:
The five burial grounds above with dedications to saints are associated with the Anglican parish churches. The Bradstone Road burial ground is for a local Baptist congregation, while the Cheriton Road site is a municipal cemetery.
In some instances, the individual may only be commemorated on a memorial and not, in fact, buried there. This is especially true of individuals who died overseas (or otherwise at distance) and whose bodies could not be repatriated but whose family wished to remember them locally.
Monumental inscriptions, by their very nature, can only be created where a monument (a headstone, cross, tablet or similar memorial) survives. Not all persons interred in a burial ground will have had a monument raised above their plot, while in other cases monuments will have become weathered and damaged over time such that they are now lost or illegible.
The images available along with the monumental transcription records are site plans. That for the Hawkinge burial ground has charming illustrations showing the proximity of graves to one another, and, like the others, could be helpfully used if visiting the site with view to finding a particular headstone or other memorial. Cheriton Road Cemetery is Folkestone’s Victorian cemetery. The first burial took place in 1856 and the last in 1995. Only the interment of ashes into family plots continues today. There are approximately 15,000 graves in the cemetery. Among these are 43 Great War graves, a memorial to members of the Machine Gun Corps, and another for the 284 lost sailors of the German naval ship SMS “Grosser Kurfürst” that sunk accidentally in the English Channel in 1878. A few entries pertain to individuals who died prior to the cemetery’s opening and are mostly recorded as having been buried elsewhere (e.g. in Folkestone parish church of St Mary). These transcripts were made in the 1980s on site in the Cheriton Road Cemetery.