According to an announcement published in the DonsidePiper.co.uk website today, Aberdeenshire Council’s burial records have been added to website www.deceasedonline.com. The website is a pay-per-view, and now subscription website specializing in burial and cremations registers for the UK and the Republic of Ireland.
Following is a teaser from the article.
Aberdeenshire Council’s burial records have been added to the specialist family history website www.deceasedonline.com.
The local authority manages in excess of 200 burial grounds and cemeteries across the area and has carried out the work to make burial records more easily available and accessible to the general public.
Included in the 200,000 records now available are the burial details of John Brown, Queen Victoria’s famous favourite, who is buried at Crathie Kirk, Balmoral.
The earliest records date from 1615 and give users an opportunity to carry out research into the history of those buried in the area.
The following is from the “About” portion of the deaceasedonline.com website.
Deceased Online is the first central database of statutory burial and cremation registers for the UK and Republic of Ireland — a unique resource for family history researchers and professional genealogists.
Until now, to search these records you had to approach about 3,000 burial authorities and over 250 crematoria in the UK alone, each independently holding their own registers, mostly as old fragile books. No official central repository exists.
Deceased Online is changing this. We are making it possible for burial and cremation authorities around the country to convert their register records, maps and photographs into digital form and bring them together into a central searchable collection.
Our growing database, holding records mainly from the 1850s onwards, can provide invaluable information for researching family trees, and can reveal previously unknown family links from other interments recorded in the same grave.
The site was launched in July 2008, and over the coming months and years we will be building a substantial database of tens of millions of burial and cremation records. We are continually adding data from all over the UK as new burial authorities and crematoria join, so keep checking. We have provided a page here where you can see easily whose data was added and when, and what information is available in each case.
Searching is FREE, and can be restricted as required to country, region, county, or individual burial authority or crematorium. If you register with Deceased Online here, you will be able to purchase vouchers online, which you can spend to access further information associated with any of the found records.
Depending on what has been provided by the originating authority, the further information might include:
burial and cremation register entries in computerised form*
digital scans of register pages*
grave details and other interments in a grave (key to making new family links)
pictures of graves and memorials
maps showing the exact locations of graves and memorials.
Some contributing authorities have completely or partially transcribed their registers into computer readable form, while others have done neither. Where registers have not been transcribed, they will have been scanned and indexed, offering a picture of the original page containing the entry of interest. In some cases you will have the option of viewing both computerised register entry and page scan.The majority of historical burial records in the UK are still in paper form. We are initiating a drive therefore, and providing all the required services, to get all these registers scanned, indexed and stored on computer. As well as preserving fragile documents, this is a major step towards making them publicly accessible on the Internet.
In addition to our normal burials and cremations register searching, we have introduced a new kind of dataset called a collection. Collections are typically records, and possibly images, that have not been indexed to the same extent as our standard records, and are often best searched by browsing through them. Options are given to purchase access to the whole collection, or just those records within it containing the surname searched for. Where collections are of memorial images with transcribed inscriptions, the inscriptions are searchable on names, dates, and any other words appearing. Collections are usually contributed to Deceased Online by private collectors or independent organisations, and typically include items such as photographs of grave headstones, often with searchable transcripts of inscriptions, or old parish registers.
