Memorials

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A Memorial is something built to honour the memory of a person. For people researching their UK family history, this is most likely to be a war memorial, gravestone or grave side stone monument. If you can find one linked to your ancestors it certainly adds a sense of history to any family record.

Gravestones and Graveyard Memorials

Unfortunately many memorials and gravestones are now unreadable and, in many cases, have disappeared completely due the U.K. weather.

Finding gravestones on the internet is a bit hit and miss. There are a few sites where people have tried to make a record of graves and these are certainly worth a try. Examples are:


Gravestone Photos
A volunteer project which aims to photograph and record the inscriptions on gravestones through the UK. At the moment they have a limited number of records but you may be lucky and find your ancestor there.

UK Graves
A similar site and, again, you may be lucky and find a photograph of a gravestone of one of your ancestors. Unfortunately, this only shows the location not the names on the headstones, so it is more difficult to find a particular family.

Duncan and Mandy Ball
Duncan and Mandy Ball have photographed over 39,000 names on gravestones. Although these are mostly in the south of England, one of them could be your ancestor.

If this fails you could try typing your family name and the word grave into a search engine, for example Google at the top of this page.

War Memorials

If you are looking for war memorials in any part Britain, the best place to start is the UK National Inventory of War Memorials UK National Inventory of War Memorials. This project aims to list all war memorials in the UK with the names of those commemorated. It includes, not only those who died on "active service" but those who died as a result of war. It has details of U.K. memorials for all wars and includes the less common memorials, like park benches and sun dials, as well as the more usual momorials.






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