Hi
You might be better putting requests about specific burials and monumental inscriptions on the relevant county boards as there will be local knowledge about what is available.
In urban areas, particularly major cities, because of health reasons churchyards tended to get closed from the 1850s onwards and civic cemeteries were opened. In London for instance there are well over 150 cemeteries including some of particular faiths. These civic cemeteries are managed either by local authorities or private companies unless they are Jewish cemeteries. The records of civic cemeteries unlike parish church registers are less likely to have been deposited in county record offices and less likely to have been indexed and therefore less likely to be on subscription websites like Ancestry.
Civic cemteries can be vast - Nottingham Road Cemetery is over 80 acres and opened in 1855, so a very large task to transcribe/photograph 150 years of gravestones just in this one cemetery - the city of Derby has 6 cemeteries. Family History Societies have concentrated their efforts on transcribing churchyard monumental inscriptions before the remaining ones are lost and far less work has been done on 'newer' civic cemeteries.
So the first thing to know is is it a churchyard burial or a civic cemetery burial.The second thing to know which you can ask civic cemetery authorities was a gravestone ever even erected in the first place. People had a right to burial in their local parish church. In civic cemeteries the funeral had to be paid for (as in a churchyard burial) and if a gravestone was erected then the plot of land as well. A large proportion of our ancestors made sure they could pay for the funeral, so their loved ones were not subjected to a pauper funeral, but purchasing the plot of land was beyond their means let alone affording a gravestone. If a gravestone was erected in either the churchyard or the cemetery then depending on age and the durability of the stone it may not have survived over the years.
Nottingham Road cemetery
http://www.derby.gov.uk/CommunityLiving/LifeEvents/Deaths/Bereavement/cemeteries.htmBecause of the numbers of yearly burials in cemeteries when contacting cemetery authorities dates of death are very helpful otherwise if the records have not been computerised, searches in burial registers can be time consuming. They may charge for searches and these charges can vary.
Regards
Valda
