Anne,
As an ex-Blyth resident, I know that Blyth Library ( Local & Family History corner) has a range of info on burials at St Mary's the Virgin, Horton Parish.
I think there is a fiche with burials, and a book, handwritten and typed, in surname alpha order, containing transcriptions from Horton gravestones... and a diagram of sections of the church graveyard, Section A, B etc..
Staff at Blyth Library are always helpful, e.g. Mark and Ann
( They will not see this praise cos the library blocks internet access to all message boards ! )
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As Blyth's population grew, the western half of it got a chapel of ease, St Mary's, a satellite of St Mary's the Virgin. This did bapts and marriages from 1864, for Blyth, the eastern corner of Horton Parish but had no graveyard.
St Mary's, Blyth, became an independent parish in 1897, but still no church graveyard.
But the area had got itself a civil cemetery in 1870s (Cowpen Cemetery), which lay within Horton Parish.
So up to the time before Cowpen Civil Cemetery opened, most burials ( RCs were buried in St Cuthberts RC, Cowpen, church graveyard) within the territory of Horton Parish, were at Horton parish church grave yard.
Then for folk at the Blyth end of the parish, burials would have been at the Cowpen civil cem. While the folk at the western end of the parish, i.e Horton itself, Bebside, etc would have still been buried at the parish church graveyard.
( The south eastern area of Blyth, that lay within the Parish of Earsdon got a chapel of ease, St Cuthbert's, in c1860, a satellite of Earsdon parish. The small graveyard of St Cuthbert's allowed a few burials, but a civil cemetery, called Blyth Cemetery, or The Links Cemetery, opened in 1860, to serve this south-eastern half of Blyth)
Trivia Angle. Today, Union Street, in the middle of Blyth, marks the old boundary line between the two parishes of Horton and Earsdon.
Michael Dixon
