Barnsley Cemeteries

[mfwebb]

I would like to share a wonderful source I have recently found; a website with transcriptions of the burial records of all the cemeteries in the Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council area of South Yorkshire. These are the public cemeteries, not the churchyard cemeteries.

The site is maintained by the Dearne Memorial Group and, for a very modest fee (£3.50 for 50 credits) you can search their burials database. One credit allows you to view one page.

If you do a Google search for Barnsley Cemeteries, the first four entries take you to the site, otherwise WibblyWobblyWay dot cemeteries dot org dot uk will get you there. I have not posted a link as I suppose this is technically a commercial site.

I stumbled across it by chance 3 weeks ago whilst preparing for a visit to the Cemeteries office at Barnsley Crematorium where I intended to trawl through the burial records for my Rooke ancestors.

My mother always told me that her grandparents “. . . had 16 children including 3 sets of twins”. I never really believed this and when I found the 5 surviving children including my own grandmother I gave up searching. It was only by looking at this family in the 1911 census, and seeing that there were 14 children of the marriage and 9 had died by 1911, that I began the search – more in memory of my mother than anything else.

The burial records for Rooke from the above site for the Barnsley and Ardsley cemeteries enabled me to immediately identify 6 of the deceased infants, including twins. Age, date of burial and place of death are given together with the grave number. I was able to identify the other 3 by a process of elimination and by sending for 2 birth certificates as the places of death did not accord with any of the addresses I had from the census returns.

I did make a visit to the Cemeteries Office as planned, but only to obtain copies of the cemetery plans so I could identify the graves on the ground. Sadly, there are no memorials on any of the graves.

I have no connection with the Dearne Memorial Group or their website – just a delighted user. I hope others with relatives who lived and died in the Barnsley area find this site as useful as I have.

[djones]

Thanks for that have had a look, didn't find who I was looking for but who I wasn't at this time. How many times does that happen.
So thats my next day off taken care of.

[Nicolina]

many thanks for this. Just what I need for my maternal line who lived in the Dearne Valley for generations.

[terrysfamily]

Thank you for this thread. I have found the burial for Oswald Joshua Swainson in 1934. I'm not going to spend 3.50 for just one record but at least now I know he is buried in the Dodworth Cemetery.

[mfwebb]

Glad you found it useful. Just one little caveat about the site -- if you do buy credits and view a page of burials don't forget to copy and paste what you find (I pasted mine into MS Word). If you need to go back to the same page it will cost you a second credit to view it again. I learned this the hard way.

All the best,

Malcolm Webb
Lincoln UK

[Nicolina]

unfortunately I'm not so lucky as to only find one entry. My FRANCE and GREEN families were like rabbits. Surprisingly I also found 3 pages of names from my paternal side (Norfolk born).

Note to self - stop doing "silly searches".

[terrysfamily]

Note to self - stop doing "silly searches".

Self, don't look at the note, we like Nicolina's "silly searches"

[Jennyruiz]

Hello, Oswald Joshua Swainson was my grandfather. His eldest son, Denis, my dad died in August 2021. Please could you tell me which branch of the family you are?
Jenny Ruiz

[Lesley Robertson]

Jenny, welcome to the British Genealogy Forum. Sadly, the first thing I have to point out is that you have joined an old thread and none of the other participants are still members. You can see that from the fact that they’re tagged “guest”. We are not allowed to retain contact information about former members, so can’t notify anyone tagged guest that they have mail.
That said, don’t give up - many more people have joined, and more data is available. Have a look round and what is where.