Quaker Burials

Quaker burials and memorial meetings are frequently happy and fulfilling occasions.  Friends and family attending a  Quaker funeral can offer memories of the deceased and Bible readings in a spontaneous way.  Quakers tend not to wear black which is the tradition in other faiths.  See also Quaker Births  Quaker Marriages and Quaker History

We have begun to compile a list of the Quaker burials of Thornbury people as recorded in the Quaker registers. Unfortunately the registers don’t show details of where a family lived but we have tried to limit the entries to those families with connections to Thornbury.  Some of these burials took place at the Friends’ Burial Ground at Lower Hazel that was used from about 1655 until around 1720.  Click on the thumbnail image to see a modern plan showing where the burial ground was.  Note it is still possible to look around the place but you must ask the person in the adjoining house for the key.

After 1720 although some Quakers were buried at Hazel most were buried in Thornbury in the burial ground next to Friend’s Meeting House in what became St John Street.  The old meeting house in St John Street was demolished in the 1980s when the human remains were exhumed and re-interred in the burial ground at Hazel in 1981.

In these older records Quakers typically did not use the names of the months or days of the week because most of these names were derived from pagan gods (e.g. Thursday came from “Thor’s Day”).  Instead, they recorded dates using numbers to describe the day of the week and month of the year.  To confuse things even more, up to and including 1751 they were still using the old Julian Calendar in which the year started on 25th March.  The existence of two calendars led to the use ‘double-dating’ in respect of recording dates in January, February and March.  Thus as you will see below the dates of ’31st day 11th month 1705/6′ would be 31st January in 1703 under the old style Julian calendar, but 31st January 1704 under the new style Gregorian calendar.

From 1752 onwards the dates were still recorded using numbers of the days and months in a particular year but the numbers were based on the modern calendar so the dates are the same as we use today.  In the listing below we have included the date as shown in the register and the date as expressed under the modern Gregorian calendar.  Please note that the ‘Piece and Folio numbers’ where quoted are those used by the Public Record Office.