Deceased Online website

A new site with a lot of potential for family historians with a connection to England or Wales, is the new Deceased Online website, as revealed on Simon Fowler's "Ancestors" magazine blog. The service, currently still in test form, promises to provide digital scans from burial and crematoria registers for councils based down south, though at present has just one council on board, Tunbridge Wells in Kent. There is a free search facility, with copies then available to be ordered.

The following is the service's press release:

Using the Internet to find Census records and entries in the Register of Births, Deaths and Marriages is fairly simple, but until now there has been no central facility for searching UK burial and cremation register records. Anyone wishing to find a grave, or details of a burial or cremation, has to approach each burial authority or crematorium individually, and in the UK there are over 10,000 cemeteries and nearly 250 crematoria! With genealogy becoming ever more popular, this is a very unsatisfactory situation.

Deceased Online is about to change all this. A central web server will store regularly updated copies of computerised register data from all participating cemeteries and crematoria, providing the first ever national database of its kind. Powerful web-based searching facilities will then allow enquirers to find burial and cremation records by name, date and locality, with the option to retrieve further related information, such as digitised images of the original register pages, photographs of headstones and other memorials, scans of book of remembrance pages, and maps to locate graves in cemeteries. One feature that will excite family researchers, and which is missing from other types of genealogy web site, is the ability to list all other interments in a located grave, enabling key family connections to be made.

As with other genealogy websites, an initial search on name and date will be free, and credits can be purchased on-line to access further information.

This national service will be invaluable to amateur and professional genealogists, who will no longer have to make hundreds of individual searches, as well as to cemetery and crematorium managers, who are being encouraged by the Government to open their register data to public Internet access.

Bereavement Services managers requiring further information can contact Deceased Online on 01273 207203 or by email at info@deceasedonline.co.uk.

Whilst it has a terrible title (it could have been worse - e.g. The Dead dot com!), it is definitely a site to keep an eye on.

Chris

www.ScotlandsGreatestStory.co.uk
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