Deaths of Babies

[Top-of-the-hill]

  Presumably in those cases there would be no record in the registers? What sort of date would this be? There would have to be another funeral due at the right time, and in smaller places there could be days or weeks between funerals. Just thinking it through.

[Jebber]

  Presumably in those cases there would be no record in the registers? What sort of date would this be? There would have to be another funeral due at the right time, and in smaller places there could be days or weeks between funerals. Just thinking it through.

He died in 1848 so it would have been prior to that. I never looked further for records of the baby as it was no connection to my family. How many other such burials he recorded I don’t know, I was only  able to access the one page of his notebook.

 I know it was quite common for infants to be buried with strangers, there was usually plenty of burials, (there was no cremation) given the number of people who died in those days without the treatment available today.

[Erato]

Surely in rural places there must have been small family or community burial grounds  unconnected to any church. There are thousands of them in the United States and thousands more have been lost under cropland, pasture or forest.

My father told me that he and another family member had once gone looking for the grave of an infant, one of a pair of twins, who died in 1877.  It is known that she was buried "near the Loomis School."  The location of the Loomis school is known but the one-room schoolhouse is long gone.  In fact, the village itself disappeared 100 years ago.  They never did find her grave or any other graves, but they are out there somewhere along county road P in the southeast quarter of section nine, Douglas Twsp., Marquette County, Wisconsin.  This area is now wooded.

[Gadget]

The church yard in the village where I grew up had a special corner for babies' graves.

I used to go with my father  to tidy the graves of grandparents and take flowers. Sometimes I used to  put flowers on one or two of the little graves.

Also, there was a little mausoleum built for an infant daughter of one of the gentry. It was built just opposite my mother's parents' grave. Dad use to lift me up to look through a tiny window to see inside. Inside there was a statue in the form of a small angel clutching flowers.

Add - just found this  of the mausoleum~

http://tinyurl.com/2p9yfbwx

(My memory is  a little out about the little angel -apparently  it is  a large angel with a child in it's arms)

[jimbo50]

I recently discovered that my sister of 14 months, was buried from the hospital, in a public grave by the registrar in 1954. It was consecrated though. I remember visiting on Sundays, but I don't think I knew why we were there.

[Top-of-the-hill]

  "Surely in rural places there must have been small family or community burial grounds  unconnected to any church."
  Not to my knowledge, Erato. Virtually everyone in a rural area would be buried in the church graveyard. Even in the scattered parishes of this area, the outer hamlets were only a mile or so from the main village.
  From the mid 19th century(?) there may have been a few village non-conformist churches with burial grounds.

[Viktoria]

I am fairly certain in those days ,there would be few if any burial places not connected to a place of worship.
You can’t just bury someone anywhere, it is surely illegal.
Public Health Acts etc.
Later when public cemeteries were allotted there would still be a small Church or Chapel for those who were not regular attenders at their local place of worship but still felt there should be some formal committal service.
Total Atheists were not really catered for.
However they were buried in authorised burial grounds I feel .
Even as late as the early 1950’s I can remember when a lady from the village died, her coffin being carried on mens’ shoulders  to her place of worship ,a tiny Baptist Chapel ,up a really steep path at least a mile from her home.
Miss Emily Davies .Village shopkeeper.

In big public cemeteries in G.B.there are always sections for denominations.
,Church of  Englan ( Anglicans)
Methodists.
Baptists .
Roman Catholic .

It has been known in primitive times for malefactors and people deemed  as “different”  to be buried at cross roads, but many many years ago, hundreds of years.

Viktoria.

[Erato]

Well, once the English got to North America, they took a more practical approach.  Here's an example from my tree - Mitchell Cemetery, Litchfield, Kennebec County, Maine.  It is located on a ridge a few hundred yards from the old Mitchell farmhouse which was built in the early 19th century.  Several dozen people are buried there, not all of them Mitchells.  My ggg-grandparents are there along with numerous other family members.  The Mitchells were not atheists or members of some unusual, break-away sect, nor were they malefactors or "different."  Indeed, the Mitchells were probably the most hardcore and conventionally pious branch of my tree.

[Viktoria]

Was there a place  of worship anywhere near the little cemeteryErato?
I suppose pioneers held their own services, there being no place of worship ie a Church or Chapel, so they would make a cemetery too.


The post pertained to baby burials  in The U.K. so I only mentioned what I knew of those.
Viktoria.