Burial and cremation registers for councils

The records

Burial and cremation registers are some of the most consulted records a council holds, and some of the most fragile. Every enquiry from a family, a funeral director or a researcher means another handling of a book that may be a century and a half old.

What we did

For councils and crematoria including Nuneaton and Bedworth, Havering, Hull, Wolverhampton and Nene Valley Crematorium, our team collects the registers in fireproof boxes and brings them to the studio. Each is scanned whole, without cutting, open in a cradle under overhead scanners, and every image is checked before the book goes back.

Every entry is then transcribed by hand: names, dates, ages, plot references and the notes in the margins. Optical character recognition cannot read old registers reliably, so people do it, and each line is checked against the original.

Where the records go

Most go on to Deceased Online, the service Manuscripti formed with Gower in 2007 as the UK’s first online database of statutory burial and cremation records. There the records are preserved, searchable by families and researchers anywhere in the world, and earn each service a share of the revenue from record requests.

The collections are large. Hull’s records hold some 519,000 names across six cemeteries and Chanterlands Crematorium, from 1861. Wolverhampton’s hold more than 284,000, with register scans and section maps. Havering’s four cemeteries hold around 75,000 names from 1871, and Nuneaton and Bedworth’s records, around 100,000 from 1875, went live in May 2026.

Others go into Epilog Cloud, the council’s own systems or its archive. The choice is always the council’s.