This index includes over 300,000 London burials in three datasets, Boyd's London Burials, City of London Burials and St Leonard Shoreditch Burials.
The London Burials Index can help you locate individuals who were living in London at a particular time, ie before the date of their death. It is also likely (though you cannot be 100% sure) that they had been living in the area of London where they were buried. So if you suspect an ancestor might have been living in London, searching these records may help confirm this.
Boyd's London Burials
This dataset, completed by Percival Boyd in 1934, is an index to a few of the burials in the London area 1538–1872. The entries were restricted "as far as possible" to burials of adult males, and give the surname, forename, year of death and the burial ground. There are 243,000 entries. Where the age at death was given it the original records Boyd recorded this, but only a small proportion of the records contain the age.
Boyd commented: "Those who use this index are warned that it must be treated as a "lucky dip", if you find what you want, well & good; if you don't, you have searched nothing." He means, of course, that in those pre-Internet days, you had not spent hours if not days trawling through un-indexed burial records in remote cemeteries.
City of London Burials
The City of London Burials Index covers 36,000 burials in 76 parishes in the City of London primarily for the period 1813-1854, but with a handful earlier (22 burials from 1781 to 1811) and later (29 from 1855 to 1904).
Some parishes included in Boyd's London Burials have been partially re-indexed in City of London Burials, so you may find duplicate entries in some cases. (This will at least help confirm the accuracy of the transcribed data.)
The International Genealogical Index transformed genealogical research, and made the tracing of ancestry much easier. However the IGI covers mainly baptisms, with a few marriages and no burials at all. English parish burial registers after 1813 almost always include the age at death. This is a vital detail in the further tracing of the family, but actually to find an entry is very difficult. There will rarely be any tradition or other evidence to guide you to a date. In most cases, the ancestor could have died aged anything between 25 and 100. Nowhere is tracing a burial more difficult than in the City of London, where there are so many registers to search. There are 98 burial registers, or series of registers in the City area for the period 1813-1857. Burials were ended by official order in most parishes in 1853 and in all by 1857. Many had ceased or virtually ceased to have burials for 10-15 years prior to that. To search all these registers for an ancestor would be a daunting and probably fruitless task, since the majority of burials took place outside the city.
Cliff Webb began work in 1978 on a general index to these burials. Because of the serious deficiencies in the pre-1866 death indexes at the Family Records Centre, the index carries right on to the end of the burial registers, rather than ending in 1837.
The index contains the surname and forename, the age as given in the register, the year of burial (and in the case of St Sepulchre only the month), and the parish name. The parishes are all in the City proper, except Charterhouse Chapel (Finsbury), St Mark Myddelton Square (Clerkenwell) and St Thomas Charterhouse (Finsbury), which although just outside the City are small entities, easily missed by searchers. Full list of parishes.
St Leonard Shoreditch Burials 1813-1853
The St Leonard Shoreditch Burial index, complied by the Society of Genealogists, covers over 32,000 burials in this parish, in the period 1813-1854.
The elegant church of St Leonard Shoreditch was built between 1736 and 1740 after the tower of its predecessor collapsed during a service in 1716. There had been a church on this spot since the 12th century and in the Elizabethan period it was used by many actors working at the two nearby theatres. The grave of Shakespeare's friend, and builder of the Curtain theatre, Richard Burbage, is in the churchyard.
By the middle of the 18th century the parish had a population of about 10,000. The 1801 census showed an increase in just 50 years to 35,000. Between 1822 and 1827 the "Waterloo churches" of St John Hoxton and St Mary Haggerston were built to cope with the rising population and in 1830 they were spilt off to form two new ecclesiastical parishes. In 1831 the population was recorded as 69,000. A third ecclesiastical parish (St James, Curtain Road) was created in 1841. By 1851 the population had risen to 109,000.
Overcrowding, disease and poverty were so great in this area that the Shoreditch vestry levied a special Poor Rate in 1774 to create a workhouse for the parish. This was the first in London to have a separate isolation ward for housing those with infectious diseases, in particular those infected with cholera. The parish burial registers for the 41 years from 1813 to 1853 record the deaths of 32,684 individuals. The average number per year was about 800 but during the cholera epidemics of 1832 and 1849 the number shot up to over a thousand.
There are separate burial registers for the Workhouse 1778-1828 but the bodies of many people who died there were claimed by relatives and buried in St Leonard's churchyard. These burials are recorded in the registers of the parish church and are included in this index.
The coverage of the index will soon be extended backwards to 1805 and forwards to the end of interment in the churchyard in 1858 and to include Workhouse burials 1820 to 1828. Earlier entries relating to adult males buried at Shoreditch between 1560 and 1745 can be found in Boyd's London Burials.
