Administrative and Business Records

The Leeds General Cemetery Company Ltd Archive mainly consists of records relating to the creation and later management of the company.

Firstly, there are corporate records kept or created by the Committee of the Leeds General Cemetery Company, who managed the running of the cemetery. This includes material such as: meeting minute books, correspondence files, shareholding records, annual reports of the company, and papers relating to the setting-up of the cemetery in the 1830s.

Records relating to company property and other legal matters make up another section of the archive. This includes material such as property deeds, contracts for work on the cemetery site, draft documents and agreements, and correspondence files relating to other legal work undertaken for the company.

In addition to papers relating to the management of the company at a corporate level, the archive also contains records produced in the day-to-day running of the cemetery. These include financial and operational material such as: receipt books, day books, registers and correspondence for orders of grave stones and grave maintenance, wages books, minster’s fee books, bank statements, and accounts.

Finally, there are also records created or kept by the University of Leeds Bursar’s Office relating to the Leeds General Cemetery Company. These cover the University’s relationship with the company prior to acquiring the site, and then the later management of the cemetery.

The collection has been organised into six separate sub-collections in order to reflect these key areas of work, under the following headings:

• Corporate, Administrative and Shareholding
• Property and Legal
• Records of Burial
• Operations
• Finance
• University of Leeds records relating to the Leeds General Cemetery Company Ltd

Image credit: Annual Report 1895 [Ref: MS 421/1/4/4]