Premature Burials...

[Wexflyer]

Inquiries about "premature baptisms" are a regular feature on genealogy websites, so I just thought I would point point that yesterday I encountered a "premature burial". Burial register has date of death two days before the civil registration date..

[majm]

Shocked and flummoxed and I wonder ....  could the registrar have confused date of death and date of burial?

JM

[aghadowey]

My great-great-grandfather's death announcement was in the newspaper before (according to death certificate) he died 

[medpat]

The person could have been buried soon after death and the registration could have been done later. A doctor's cert to say a natural death may have been good enough to bury them. Could travelling a distance to register have caused a delay?

I know someone who's mother died last year. He phoned the registrars to be told he couldn't have a appointment for 8 days that's 3 days longer than the legal requirement to register it. 

 

[Sinann]

You don't need a GRO issued death cert to have the funeral in Ireland just a doctors cert, so it would very easy to be buried before the date on the official cert.

[hallmark]

Without seeing what we're talking about it's difficult to say.

[hallmark]

Deaths must be registered as soon as possible after the death and no later than 3 months.

http://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/death/after_a_death/death_cert.html

[Billyblue]

According to the death certificate of my Mum's maternal grandfather, he died one week after he was buried!

As some wag commented, it must have been an uncomfortable week for him           

All this happened in rural NSW, 1870s.

Dawn M

[Elwyn Soutter]

The Registrar wouldn’t normally be interested in the date of burial since it’s not recorded on Irish certificates. He would normally just record the information the informant gave. If that date of death was wrong (and information on death certificates does frequently contain mistakes) then so be it. 

A doctor or coroner’s certificate to register a death was only required in Ireland from the 1890s. Prior to that you just went in and registered it, much as you would do for a birth. No paperwork required. No verification procedure.

The other possibility is that the information in the burial register is wrong. Our local Minister completes his registers in batches, some several weeks after the event. There is scope with that sort of system to make a mistake of a day or two.