The Spreadsheet

Spreadsheet and Worksheets

The collated spreadsheet of burial register and inscription information can be accessed through the button below. It has three worksheets. The first simply contains the information on spreadsheet format set out below. The second (and main) worksheet brings together all available information for all those interments with a burial register entry between 1813 and 2012 (15446 entries). The third collates those monumental inscriptions for which there is no register entry (1077 entries). This can be for a number of reasons – firstly around 300 inscriptions simply date from before 1813; secondly it is likely that many of the names on the inscriptions simply commemorate an individual rather than indicating an interment; and thirdly, the process of compiling the spreadsheet leads me to believe it is quite possible that there are some omissions in the burial registers. The format of the second and third worksheets is the same.

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Spreadsheet format

  • Column A, Burial Register reference in the form adopted by the earlier Burntwood Family History Group transcription, for example T01-0067, where T01 refers to the register number in date sequence (01 to 14) and 067 refers to the entry number.
  • Columns B to E. The Surname and up to three Christian names given in the Burial Register.
  • Columns F to I. The Surname and up to three Christian names from any inscription.
  • Column J. Postnominals from any inscription.
  • Column K. The death age from the Burial Register. This is given in years. However, for children who were less than one year old when they died, where the register often gives the age in months, weeks, days or even hours, the age appears as 0. This is because the burial register information has been converted into years in decimal format and more detailed information can be recovered by changing the format of the cell to reveal up to four or five decimal places. Multiplying this figure by 365 will give the death age in days.
  • Column L. The address time of death from the Burial Register. Addresses are only given, for reasons of confidentiality, up to 1922 (100 years before the time of writing).
  • Column M. Officiating minister from Burial Reguster (up to 1922 for consistency with Column L)
  • Column N. Notes made in Burial Register (up to 1922 for consistency with Column L)
  • Column O. Plot number from Burial Register. Those beginning with L. to Q. are in the NCY, whilst all others, including those without a plot number, are in the OCY. The plot numbers for the OCY begin in the 1920s and continue sporadically till the 1950s but are far from comprehensive. Plot numbers for the NCY are complete.
  • Column P. Y indicates a cremation.
  • Column Q. Inscription from grave / memorial. A NCY entry in this column will, in most cases, have a photograph available. For the OCY a photograph will only be available if there is an entry in Column AL.
  • Column R. Blank
  • Columns S, T and U – Death year, month and day from Burial Register (generally from 1990 onwards).
  • Columns V, W and X – Death year, month and day from any inscription (from 1813 onwards).
  • Columns Y, Z and AA – Cremation year, month and day from Burial Register (generally from 1999 onwards)
  • Columns AB, AC and AD – Interment year, month and day from Burial Register (from 1813 onwards).
  • Column AE. Blank
  • Column AF. 1967 survey line number in the form SLxxxx (OCY only)
  • Column AG. 1967 survey grave number in the form SG.xxxx (OCY only)
  • Column AH. 1984 survey line number in the form BL.xxxx (OCY only)
  • Column AL. 1984 survey area in the form BA.xx (OCY only)
  • Column AJ. 1984 survey grave number in the form BG,x,xx (NCY only)
  • Column AK. An identifier for those monuments not identified in the 1967 and 1984 surveys but found in the current work in the form U.xx
  • Column AL. 2022 area or cluster (OCY only). An entry in this column indicates that a photograph is available.

Notes on methodology

Naturally this information comes from a variety of sources and is prone to a number of different types of error.

  • Transcription errors in the 1967 and BMSGH surveys, which can be of many different types, but primarily affect the death dates, with confusion between number 3, 5 and 8 or 1 and 7 in particular.
  • Errors in the digitisation processes in the compilation of the spreadsheet.
  • Errors in the names in the burial register which were in the earlier years written down from the oral version given by the family.

In editing the material from the various sources, I have tried to be as consistent as possible and used the following principles.

  • I have harmonised the names and death dates of the 1967 and BMSGH surveys, mainly using data from the latter which subjectively seems to have been more carefully compiled.
  • I have given priority to the names from these surveys over the burial register names – on the basis that the families were more likely to have correctly specified the name for the inscription than it was to have been written in the register.
  • By contrast, I have taken the register dates to be the most reliable, as entries were recorded in date order and were thus self-checking. In general death dates and register dates were within 1 to 10 days of each other. Where grave death dates and register dates were inconsistent with each other, in most cases it was possible to make them within a few days of each other (with the death date before the register date) by simply assuming a numerical transcription error for the survey dates. After this process was complete there were still a small number of inconsistent date sets.

Using the spreadsheet

The advantage of putting all the information together into a simple spreadsheet format is its transferability and its likely longevity – EXCEL spreadsheets are likely to be readable much longer than more complex databases. EXCEL also offers the possibility of a simple search engine for names and dates (Control + F) and the ability to sort the data by any of the variables in the above list. If this is done however, it would be advisable to keep a master copy to return to in case things go wrong (such as am accidental partial sorting of some of the columns10. I speak from experience here, having made this mistake a number of times.