St Mary’s Churchyard Project
Riviera Heritage
A project to record the memorial inscriptions engraved on the headstones of those buried in St Mary’s Churchyard, Brixham has been completed. Nina Hannaford tells us more.
A
dedicated group of volunteers has spent two years deciphering ancient and weathered headstones in beautiful St Mary’s Churchyard, carefully reading the inscriptions, recording the details and plotting the locations. The initial remit for the lottery-funded project was to focus on the Victorian memorials. However, the churchyard covers nearly three acres over various plots and contains headstones from early 1700 to the present day. The volunteers quickly discovered that each plot contained burials and dates ranging over 300 years, and rarely in neat rows. Therefore, a decision was made to complete the huge task of recording all the memorial inscriptions in the churchyard. During the Second World War some of St Mary’s Churchyard records were destroyed in the ‘Exeter Blitz’. englishrivieramagazine.co.uk
The Churchwardens were frequently being asked the whereabouts of family plots recorded in the church burial records, but they were not in a position to provide information on the locations. To start the recording process, the church and churchyard were divided into twelve different areas, each given a number. Each row of headstones was given an alphabetical reference. However, as few rows are straight, some estimation was required. Each burial plot was then given a number, whether there was a memorial stone there or not. Used together, these co-ordinates have given each burial plot a unique reference. Recorded on a database, every name is now searchable, offering family researchers a unique plot reference to be able to find any headstone of interest. April/May 2020 | 35
