About the data

The Leeds General Cemetery Burial Registers Index contains transcribed entries from the 25 registers of burial in the Leeds General Cemetery Company Ltd Archive. The registers have also been digitised and can be viewed online.

What has been transcribed?

The transcribed fields are listed below. In the index, some field titles have been changed to make them clearer. The original titles are in brackets:

Burial Number [No. Buried]
Plot Number [No. of Grave]
Name of the Deceased [Christian Name and Surname]
Date of death
Date of burial
Age at Death [Age]
Gender [Sex]
Cause of Death [Disease]
Occupation or role [Rank, Trade or Profession]
Mother’s Name & Father’s Name (separately) [Name of Mother & Father]
Occupation of Parent(s) [Addition of Mother & Father]

The following fields from the registers have not been included in the transcription, but are available to view in the digital images:

Residence
Where born
Signature of the Informant
Officiating Minister

There are some additional fields in the index entries, these are:

Burial register number [showing the catalogue reference number]
Additional Transcription Notes [where any additional information noted in the registers has been transcribed]
Transcription Anomalies [used for any notes to accompany the transcription]

You may see the term [Unknown] appear in a field. This is used where there was no text in the register to transcribe, or where a transcription has not been attempted due to difficulty in deciphering the handwriting.

What information can I expect to find in particular fields?

Burial Number

Each burial was given a burial number by the Leeds General Cemetery Company. Generally, the registers list entries in order of burial number. However, there are examples in the registers where a burial number has been used twice, or a particular run of burial numbers has been duplicated. So the burial numbers themselves may not always give an accurate representation of the order of burial and the number of burials in the cemetery overall.

Plot Number

Multiple people could be buried in one particular grave plot, so you may see the same plot number linked to many index entries. You can search the index by the plot number to find details of each person buried in that plot - see our Looking for a family member guidance for more information.

Separate to the Index, there is also a digital copy of a plot map of the cemetery available to view on our website.

Name of deceased

The first-names and surnames within this field in the registers have been transcribed, but middle-names have not been included in the transcription.

You may see examples in the register images where multiple names have been written in the same field. These have each been transcribed as a separate index entry.

Age

Age is recorded in the registers as a number and value, i.e. ‘2 years’, ‘3 months’, ‘5 weeks’ etc. Sometimes, the ages for infants have been written as fractions in the register, e.g. ‘1 ¾ years’. Where this is the case, for those below 2 years of age, any entry written in a fraction or in ‘months and years’ has been entered as a ‘months’ value. For example, if the register records '1 1/2 years' this appears in the index as '18 months'. Ages over 2 years have been entered as full years only.

Rank, Trade or Profession

This field records the deceased persons' occupation, their marital status, or whether they were a child or infant. Many of the occupations listed are historic and no longer in common use. There can also be many variants in the terms or spelling used for the same occupation in the registers: e.g. both 'bank clerk' and 'clerk in bank' are present.

Disease

This field records the cause of death. Due to the age of the registers, many of the medical terms used are archaic, and there can be many variants in spelling and terms used for the same disease. For help with finding out the modern equivalents of these terms, a glossary of archaic medical terms, diseases and causes of death is available online: http://www.genproxy.co.uk/old_medical_terms.htm

General transcription information

The data within the fields has been transcribed as it appears, but some abbreviations have been expanded where known (e.g. where ‘Elizth’ has been written in the register, it has been transcribed as ‘Elizabeth’).
You may also come across blank entries in the digital images of the registers which contain no information about a person buried, but have ‘cancelled’ or similar terms recorded. These entries have not been included in the index as there is no personal information to record.
Often, the first page of a number of the registers is a copied duplicate of the last page of the previous register. Where this has occurred, only one of the copies of these pages has been transcribed.

Why do some of the register images have sections missing?

Some of the fields in the registers contain information relating to potentially living persons. For the purposes of adhering to the UK Data Protection Act 1998, information relating to potentially living individuals for burials during the last 75 years has been withheld from publication.

Therefore, fields containing the following information may be hidden from public view: details on the deceased’s mother and father; the informant, and the officiating minister. This is only currently the case for the final two burial registers [ref: MS 421/3/1/24 & 25].

The rest of the information in the registers relating to the deceased person will still be open to view (i.e. their name, age, date of death, occupation etc.)

What do I do if I find an incorrect transcription?

Although we have done our best to provide an accurate transcription, occasionally a transcription error may occur. Often the handwriting in the registers is difficult to read, and is sometimes even indecipherable.

If you come across a transcription you would like to query, please send the details over to us and we will check the data. You can do these from each index entry via the Contact us link under the Comments and corrections section. Or email us at: specialcollections@library.leeds.ac.uk