gmc4404 - it also depends on date. Cremation became legal in the late 1800s & now is the majority choice, having become steadily more popular in the second half of the 20th century. Prior to the mid 1800s burials were generally in graveyards associated with a religious building. From around the 1850s local authorities created cemeteries, particularly in urban areas, while in some areas their equivalent were set up by companies.
The newer version of FamilySearch includes many burial registers from parish churches & a few others, where the old IGI did not include these.
GENUKI is a site that has pages for a local area - many state when particular churchyards were in use, when local cemeteries opened & where the records are now. The page can often be found by a search on GENUKI + county + place name or can be found via the menu systems from the home page:
http://www.genuki.org.uk/Some local authorities have an online search facility for the cemeteries they run; others will do searches for you at a cost.
One site I find useful for transcriptions of MIs (memorial inscriptions) is WishfulThinking which has good coverage for several counties:
http://places.wishful-thinking.org.uk/Other sites may be listed on RootsChat under the Resources area for each county's forum. Eg for Bedfordshire:
http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php/board,347.0.html
