Search through thousands of records from one of London’s oldest cemeteries. The records may reveal your ancestor’s age at the time of death, residence, and burial date. Among the thousands of names, you will find suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, Native American Chief Long Wolf, and Chelsea Football Club’s founder Henry Augustus Mears. The Brompton Cemetery records have been digitised from the registers held by The National Archives.
Search through thousands of records from one of London’s oldest cemeteries. The records may reveal your ancestor’s age at the time of death, residence, and burial date. Among the thousands of names, you will find suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, Native American Chief Long Wolf, and Chelsea Football Club’s founder Henry Augustus Mears. The Brompton Cemetery records have been digitised from the registers held by The National Archives.
With each record, you will find a transcript and an image of the original cemetery record. In many cases, you will find more than one result for your ancestor – a burial register and a grave purchase record. The transcript may provide a combination of the following facts:
Name
Birth year
Death year
Burial year
Burial date
Year
Age – age recorded at the time of death
Residence
Place
County and country
Print number
Burial register number
Document type
Piece description
Records year range
Archive reference
Archive
Image
We recommend that you view the image attached to each transcript. Images may reveal additional details such as the cost of the grave, the owner of the gravesite, who paid for the burial, whether a private or common grave, and your ancestor’s occupation.
Use the arrow to the right of the grave purchase image to view the full document.
The Brompton Cemetery records are held at The National Archives in series WORK 97, The National Archives Office of Works and successors: Royal Parks and Pleasure Gardens: Brompton Cemetery Records.
Brompton Cemetery was first opened in June 1840 and designed by Benjamin Baud. The records show on 17 June 1840, Emma Shaw, age 23, was the first person to be buried in the cemetery. Brompton Cemetery was opened by the West London and Westminster Cemetery Company in response to the shortage of burial spaces in London. It is one of the seven large cemeteries surrounding the capital city, known as the magnificent seven cemeteries, established by private companies. The cemetery is located on the western border of Chelsea and Kensington.
Brompton Cemetery is a working cemetery. There are about 205,000 people buried on the grounds including political activists, inventors, actors, sports champions, Chelsea pensioners, and more. Some of the notable names we have discovered include
Sir Henry Cole – an inventor and civil servant. Cole is credited with introducing the world to the first commercial Christmas card in 1843.
Emmeline Pankhurst – suffragette and political activist. The Pankhurst family were leaders of the women’s suffragette movement. Emmeline died in June 1928, a short time before women were given equal voting rights.
John Wisden – cricket champion. Wisden was also the founder of Wisden Cricketer’s Almanac.
Long Wolf - Native American Chief. Long Wolf died while touring with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. His body was later exhumed and reinterned at Pine Ridge, South Dakota. The records show that the burial plot originally belonged to William Cody, also known as Buffalo Bill.
Henry Augustus ‘Gus’ Mears - founder of Chelsea Football Club. Mears founded the Chelsea Football Club in 1905.
William Claude Kirby - Chelsea Football Club’s first chairman. Kirby was given the position of chairman shortly after the club was formed.
General Michał Tadeusz Karaszewicz-Tokarzewski - founder of the Polish resistance movement during the Second World War. After the war, the Polish General settled in England and became the General Inspector of the Armed Forces of the Polish forces in exile.