Some questions answered, some new ones posed - all systems normal then in this fascinating hobby.
6 in a grave - that would cause a massive amount of settlement as the coffins rotted away and would have been a pretty horrible job for the gravediggers as the later/last burial graves were dug. My grandfather was a church sexton and my father used to help him dig graves, both of them absolutely hated double burials where there was a few years after the initial burial, they never knew what they were going to encounter. My grand father and his wife are buried in the same plot and the settlement for just their two coffins was well over 60cm leaving an ankle breaking hole in the ground - a 30 cm raised mound disappeared leaving a 30 cm hole plus the grave sides starting caving in. Part of my grandfather's job was filling in such settlements to make the cemetery safe and whenever I went exploring in the cemetery while my father was attending to my grandparents grave he always warned me to look out for these settlements.
The family 'arrangements' sound 'interesting' and there could be many explanations as to what the arrangements were. I've found an ancestor where the wife's sister acted as housekeeper and I suspect nurse to her sister as she died young, then married the wife's husband and had children with him - there were no offspring from the first marriage, leastways none that I could find in the parish records where they lived all their lives.
