Thornbury Baptist Church Old Burial Ground

We are grateful to the Baptist Church in Thornbury for allowing us to look at the records held in their safe.  Amongst these we were fortunate to find a plan of the Old Burial Ground.  This gives each grave a reference number indicating its location in the graveyard.  The plan (shown above) is in the form of squares and each reference is made up from the number on each row and the letter on each column.

The register provides the names of people buried in each grave and the date they died and age at death.  We have listed below the names of people copied from the burial register.  We know from other sources (the Church Minutes and Burial Certificates) that other people were buried in that part of the churchyard but we don’t know which grave they were buried in.

It is interesting to note that the Church Minutes of 24th February 1845 said that the burial ground was nearly full and that in future ‘only members and their families and regular hearers’ would be permitted to be buried there until they were able to enlarge the churchyard.  They also decided to impose a charge of 2/6d be paid for burying a child under 15 years of age and 5/- for all above that age in addition to the charge for digging the grave.  A Church Minute dated 1st May 1848 shows that the Church bought a small piece of adjoining ground (61ft by 8ft) from William Osborne Maclaine for which it paid five shillings.  This land was incorporated into the Old Building Ground.

In 1895 there was a major extension to the burial ground when an adjoining section of land was purchased from the William Sutcliffe Marsh and further graves added in that part. We have a plan of that section of the graveyard with details of the people buried there.  See More

The part of the graveyard known as the Old Burial Ground still exists and is open to visitors.  However please note that when the Church was re-developed in the 1980s the gravestones which remained were re-located around the wall of the graveyard.  These gravestones represent only a small proportion of the original graves and of the stones that remain some are completely illegible.  We have transcribed the inscriptions on the gravestones that we were able to read.  Memorial Inscriptions