These monumental inscriptions within the churchyard of St Mary’s, Thornbury come from three sources. The earlier ones were included in the collection made by Ralph Bigland, a Garter King of Arms in the late eighteenth century. Others were transcribed by Mr and Mrs S. F. Pitts of Thornbury between 1985 and 1988 and added to by George Mills, also of Thornbury, who also drew up a plan to show the position of the graves.
The excellent work of these people has been invaluable to residents and of course to visitors to Thornbury who want to trace their family roots. We have entered them in this website to make them available to a wider audience. We have verified them where possible, but some have obviously deteriorated further and we are grateful that transcriptions were taken in time. We added photographs that we took in 2006, but we have replaced these in 2014 with bigger and better quality images.
The surnames are arranged alphabetically. Please click on the appropriate letter in the list shown on the left to search for the name you are interested in.
In the list of inscriptions for each letter, the reference next to each inscription helps you locate the tomb if you want to visit the Church. When George Mills created his plan of the Churchyard he gave a number to each grave.
For ease of reference we have divided George’s plan into 6 sections and allocated each a letter A to F. We have added this letter to the front of George’s grave number to identify the section in which each grave lies. Where there is no reference, it means that the grave is no longer identifiable and the inscription comes from an earlier transcription. This is generally that taken by Ralph Bigland in the later part of the eighteenth century.
You can see a large scale image of each section showing the location of each grave. To locate a grave, you must note the reference number given in the left hand column against each inscription e.g. A101. The letter ‘A’ indicates that the grave is in the ‘A’ section of the plan, so you should click on the thumbnail image for Section A to link to this section below and look for grave ‘101’:
Click on the thumbnail on the right to see an overview map of the whole churchyard to see where each section is in relation to the Church building. Note on this plan, you will not be able to read the grave numbers.