City of London Cemetery - grave re-use

[dawnsh]

The attachment makes an interesting point, that some graves were purchased and never used.

I disvered something similar a couple of weeks ago when I was looking at the registers for Ealing & Brentford Old Cemetery. Some plots were bought decades before they were finally used.

It seems that some were bought at COL and forgotten about.

[dawnsh]

My ancestral village in Surrey has a small church and churchyard.

I have traced my ancestors back there to the start of parish registers and assume that they were in the village/area long before that.

If this village has been regularly using the churchyard for documented burials since the mid 1500's, then the ground has been reused many times over since then.

Imagine 100+ per year for 500 years, no way you could fit 50,000 people lying down in that area, even 25,000 if buried 2 deep without doubling up over time.

[Churchie]

Imagine 100+ per year for 500 years, no way you could fit 50,000 people lying down in that area, even 25,000 if buried 2 deep without doubling up over time.

That's why the ground level around some old churches is so high.
When you read contemporary accounts about the old London burial grounds it's stomach heaving stuff - how they squashed the previous years burials down...