On Saturday 4 June, the Oswestry Cemetery Project went back on the road celebrating the Cherishing Churchyards Week. Oswestry Town Council’s Archivist, Sara Downs, attended the Shropshire Family History Fair at the Shirehall in Shrewsbury with a display about the Oswestry Cemetery Project and Oswestry Town Archives.
Over a hundred people attended the event and there was a lot of interest in the Oswestry Cemetery Project. There were many enquiries including one from a researcher undertaking one name study on the family name Parry (there are 163 Parrys on the burials database), and a request for information on how to map graves.
The HLF funded project finished in March 2015, but Oswestry Town Council have continued funding the Oswestry Cemetery Project until March 2017. In the last year 800 genealogy reports have been completed and eight sections of grave images have been added to the Project website. If your ancestor was buried in sections B, C, D, K, L, M, H1 and J1 there should now be an image of the grave to see on your ancestor’s burial entry (if they had a gravestone). If your ancestor was buried between 1862 and 1876 there should be a genealogy report about them on the website.
Work continues on the grave survey and genealogy research and more information will be uploaded over the coming months.