30,000 Kent ‘MIs’ from 300 Parishes now on our Website

The recent addition of another 1,000 memorial inscriptions ('MIs') to the Research pages of http://www.kentarchaeology.org.uk brings the total number available there online to more than 30,000, recorded in nearly 300 Kent parishes.

The project began 14 years ago when several family history enthusiasts and KAS volunteers started to transcribe and index records that they and their predecessors had made while inspecting graves in churches, churchyards and cemeteries across the county over a period of nearly 250 years. As well as naming those buried in the graves, many MIs identify their parents, spouses and offspring, so the total number of names that have now been recorded amounts to several thousand.

Visitors to the website can browse through an alphabetical list of parishes or search for a name in all the burial places at once.

The earliest MIs were found in notes made by Rev. Bryan Faussett of Heppington (Fig.1), in the parish of Nackington, near Canterbury, while visiting about 150 churchyards between 1756 and 1760. Another early MI recorder was Leland Lewis Duncan of Lewisham, who worked tirelessly from the 1880s until he died in 1923.

Fig 1 Rev. Bryan Faussett. Courtesy of National Museums, Liverpool.

Many inscriptions have become illegible over the intervening years, and in many cases the gravestones themselves have disappeared without trace and the sites of the graves on which they stood can be located only if an original burial plan has survived.

Thanks to our website, Rob Flyn of New South Wales, a descendent of the Morphetts of Tenterden, was able to find the MI that Leyland Duncan recorded at a Morphett grave in Wittersham. The gravestone, erected in about 1800, has not survived, but the site was identified by KAS webmaster Ted Connell while photographing churches and their graveyards in and around Romney Marsh. (Fig.2).

Fig 2 Ted Connell marks the spot where the Morphett grave was situated

Among others who have found broken links in their family history is Oliver a Gauld-Galliers, who was trying to trace Elizabeth Carter Sharpe, one of his grandmother's ancestors. Our records led Oliver to her grave and that of her husband William Read at St Mary’s, Lamberhurst, and revealed that three of their children predeceased their mother (Fig.3).

Fig 3 Oliver Gauld-Galliers at the grave of William and Elizabeth Read

MIs from several parishes in north Kent recorded by D E Williams include a family burial plot at St James, Cooling, immortalized by Charles Dickens. This is where, in Great Expectations, orphan Pip recalled, “As I never saw my father or my mother; my first fancies regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones”. In real life the tombs are those of the Comport family. Near the graves is “Pip’s lozenge” marking the grave of six little brothers to those of Pip’s five brothers (Fig.4).

Fig 4 The Comport family plot at Cooling, 1903. KAS Catherine Weed Barnes Ward collection

Transcriptions of the Wills of Michael Comport and some of his descendants are also published on the website, as are family histories, census returns, directory entries, and death and funeral reports.

Also of special interest in Mr Williams's research are:

Cooling (St James)
John William Murton of Cooling Castle, “who on his passage to Calcutta in the ship Monarch fell overboard and was drowned when off Rio De Janeiro” (extract from captain’s log reads: “and so perished one of the finest and best hearted seamen who ever trod a ship’s deck”).

Frindsbury (All Saints)
John George Mount, “45 years in the RN ... and with Admiral Lord Nelson at Trafalgar 21st Oct 1805”.

William Halls, “late captain of the barge Trader who was drowned by being run down by the S.S. Tay in November 1886 and found July 12th 1887”.

Hoo (St Werburgh)
Thomas Aveling, builder of steam traction engines, some of which were used to plough and drain the Thames marshes.

David Webb and Alfred Groves, drowned in their sleep when their barge foundered in the Thames.

The three children of William Lionel Wyllie RA (prolific marine painter and etcher), none of whom lived for more than six days.

Rochester (St Nicholas Cemetery)
Captain Herbert Claude Morton, “killed in the explosion of HMS Bulwark”. The ship exploded on November 26 1914 while anchored off Sheerness, with the loss of 736 men.

Shorne (St Peter and St Paul’s Church)
Sarah Bevan, who left instructions to be buried in her usual night clothes, wrapped in a long white dress. In an inner coffin, then in a lead coffin covered with black cloth, black plates and nails and “kept 10 days before burial and taken to the church with two black coaches to attend”.

Strood
George Bennett, bricklayer, in his day a famous cricketer. His headstone states that, in 1862, for England in Australia.

Chatham (St Mary)
Three members of the Mills family and 12 others, including a boatman, drowned in 1816 while attempting to pass through Rochester Bridge when their boat struck a piece of timber which had been placed, without warning, across an arch under repair. This incident became known as the Rochester Bridge Disaster.

Stonemason’s tribute to a carpenter (Fig.5). This picture, taken in about 1903 at St Mary Magdalene, Cobham, churchyard, shows how a stonemason used his skills to commemorate Richard Gransden, a carpenter, who died in May 1760. He was christened on October 29 1688 at St John the Baptist, Meopham and married Anne Drew in 1717 at St Mary the Virgin, Chalk, Kent. For more details of his family visit http://www.gransdenfamily.com/gransdenf/gp4145.htm

Fig 5 Stonemason's tribute to a carpenter, Richard Gransden's grave