About Deceased Online
Deceased Online is the first central database of statutory burial and cremation registers for the UK -- a unique resource for family history researchers and professional genealogists.
Until recently, to search these records you had to approach about 3,000 burial authorities and over 250 crematoria in the UK, each independently holding their own registers, mostly as old fragile books. No official central repository exists.
Deceased Online is changing this. We make it possible for burial and cremation authorities around the country to convert their register records, maps and photographs into digital form and bring them together into a central searchable collection.
Our growing database, holding records mainly from the 1850s onwards (but some dating back to the 1600's), can provide invaluable information for researching family trees, and can reveal previously unknown family links from other interments recorded in the same grave.
The site was launched in July 2009, and over the years we have been growing our substantial database of tens of millions of burial and cremation records. We are continually adding data from all over the UK as new burial authorities and crematoria join, so keep checking. We have provided a page where you can see easily whose data was added and when, and what information is available in each case.
Simple searching is FREE, and free Advanced Searching is available to registered users who have purchased pay-per-view vouchers during the last six months or who have a subscription. Advanced searches can be restricted as required to country, region, county, burial authority, cemetery or crematorium. If you register with Deceased Online, you will be able to purchase vouchers online, which you can spend to access further information associated with any of the found records.
Depending on what has been provided by the originating authority, the further information might include:
- burial and cremation register entries in computerised form*
- digital scans of register pages*
- grave details and other interments in a grave (key to making new family links)
- pictures of graves and memorials
- maps showing the section or exact location of graves and memorials.
Where registers have not been fully transcribed, they will be scanned and indexed for searching, offering a picture of the original page containing the entry of interest. In some cases you will have the option of viewing both computerised register entry and page scan.
The majority of historical burial records in the UK are still in paper form. We are initiating a drive therefore, and providing all the required services, to get all these registers scanned, indexed and stored on computer. As well as preserving fragile documents, this is a major step towards making them publicly accessible on the Internet.
In addition to our normal burials and cremations register searching, we have introduced a new kind of dataset called a collection. Collections are typically records, and possibly images, that have not been indexed to the same extent as our standard records, and are often best searched by browsing through them. Options are given to purchase access to the whole collection, or just those records within it containing the surname searched for. Where collections are of memorial images with transcribed inscriptions, the inscriptions are searchable on names, dates, and any other words appearing. Collections are usually contributed to Deceased Online by private collectors or independent organisations, and typically include items such as photographs of grave headstones, often with searchable transcripts of inscriptions, or old parish registers.
We are continually developing the Deceased Online website, so look out for announcements about new features.
If you have any suggestions for improving the site, then we would like to hear from you. You can send us a message through our contact form.
More help on using the site can be found on the Getting Started page.
Our Terms & Conditions for using the site can be viewed on the Terms and Conditions page.
If you are responsible for burial or cremation records and would like to see them on Deceased Online, you can contact us using our contact form.
We hope you find the site valuable and enjoy using it.
*Note: To comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), information about anyone who might still be alive (applicants for funerals, grave owners, doctors etc) is restricted. This means that details of such people stored in computerised registers for more recent funerals are not made available, and the corresponding areas of scanned register images are masked off. Individual preferences of contributing authorities may mean that variations in these restrictions are in place for some of the more recent records from some authorities. In many cases, restrictions specific to a cemetery of crematorium will be explained in the entry for the establishment in the list of Contributors.