GenPals Cemetery Project has new name and Site!

Great News!

We decided a while ago that with the success of the project our use of a spare domain name that we had available was not good enough and we have now created a brand new name and site for the Cemetery Project www.cemeteryscribes.com

And to go with our new site there's a new blog found at http://cemeteryscribes.com/blog/ :

Recent additions include some photos, inscriptions and mini family trees from Bath Jewish Burial Ground, additions to Balls Pond Cemetery, West Ham Cemetery, Willesden Cemetery and coming soon Plashet Cemetery (section A).

Hope you all like our new site!

The fascinating story of Abraham Isaac, died 1733

Whilst searching on the National Archives website I came across the mention of a petition regarding an Abraham Isaac dated 1733. It didn't take me long to decide that I wanted to know more so I ordered a copy the next day.

The petition briefly tells us the story of what became of Abraham in mid May 1733, sadly there isn't a great deal of detail, leaving a lot to the imagination or, better still, further research!

Abraham was travelling to, or from, his home in Dukes Place in the City of London when on, or about the 16th May 1733, he died from a fall from a wagon on Barham Down.

Did this take place on what is today the A2 trunk road? Was this his wagon or possibly the mail coach? What caused him to fall? Was he attacked by a local highwayman such as the notorious 'Black Robin' known for shooting down coachmen? did the horse take fright, or the wagon hit a rock causing him to lose his balance? We will probably never know as there doesn't seem to have been an inquest.

However, we can learn a little about his family. He had at least one daughter. Her name was Eve and she was married to Jacob Isaac, a baker in St Mary Axe, London. Unfortunately no ages are mentioned, but just to add a little to the story, we could suppose that Eve was at least 20 years old given that she was married, she may of course have been older, and that perhaps Abraham was 20 when she was born, so it would place his birth in the late 1600's.

Abraham was probably travelling alone, at least not with friends or family or any one that knew him or his background. Presumably he wasn't carrying any papers either and therefore the village was unable to easily contact his family or, if they were able to, it took several months for the notice of Abraham’s death to reach them.

In view of the situation the decision was made to bury him and on the 16th of May 1733, Abraham Isaac was buried in the Church Yard of Barham. The local church would be St John's Church, noted for its magnificent beech trees, an ancient church going back to the 9th Century and mentioned in the Doomsday Book.

Sometime between May and Nov 1733 Abraham's family hears of his death and place of burial. His daughter Eve then petitions the Archdeacon of Canterbury, humbly praying for permission to remove the corpse of her father, Abraham Isaac, of the Jewish nation, from the Church Yard at Barham to be interred in the Jewish Burying Ground at Mile End, London. The decree is granted in court on the 8th Nov 1733.

There is nothing to say when exactly the body was moved or to which burial ground although the grounds in Alderney Road seem the most likely.

This contemporary record of a Jewish burial takes us to within 70 years of the Readmission of the Jews to the United Kingdom. It occurred only 35 years after the final purchase of the Alderney Road Burial Ground and over a decade before the acquisition of the Three Colt Yard extension. But Abraham and his pack, lying on the dusty Kentish road while, back in London his daughter anxiously waits for his return, is as vivid to me as if his story had just featured on the late evening TV News.

GenPals Cemetery Project has moved address to www.genpals.com

When we started the cemetery project we had no idea how long it would last, how much we would be able to do and more importantly how successful it would be. So the data was placed as an additional file on a site I had been using for my own family history under the address genpals.co.uk/cemeteryproject.

Some two years later, the site has grown enormously and is still growing so we decided the cemetery project deserved its own address!

GenPals Cemetery Project is now at www.genpals.com if you have bookmarks for the old address they will no longer work.

There are a number of new entries for Balls Pond Cemetery and other cemeteries so please take a look.

Never leaving a stone unturned!

Half-a-day for the photography - then comes the real work.....

It's just over 4 months since we visited The Balls Pond Road Cemetery and we've been working flat out on processing the photos ever since. So why do we still have three times as many on our "to-do" list, as we have completed and uploaded onto the site? Well, some of that is down to the mundane demands of everyday living - like going to work, ferrying kids to school and old aunties to hospital, completing the tax returns and booking the car in for a service. In other words, the minutiae of life getting in the way of the serious business to which we, and this site are dedicated

Sometimes we may get caught up in a particular story that leads us down so many varied and interesting byways that, if we didn't call a self-imposed halt to our researches, they could be in danger of developing into a doctoral thesis.

With well over 2700 stones on site, we can now link people across centuries, cemeteries, countries and continents. We haven't yet transcribed Jacob Magnus died 1888 and buried in Balls Pond Road, but the links to him will take us to his distant cousins, Nathan Joseph Magnus, and Judith [Gitele} Joseph Magnus, both buried in Brady Street, and will connect to several other families on the way. The research could be extensive and the links will certainly be many and complex: it will be a fine calculation as to how much time we allow ourselves to spend on this one family

And, sometimes, we just get stuck. For several hours now I've been peering at a picture of a perfectly upright, undamaged stone with not a single visible character to denote who it memorialises. And, yes, I've tried every trick in the PhotoShop handbook - converting to negative, playing with the brightness and contrast. You name it, I've tried it. The stone refuses to give up its secrets.

With luck, we may be able to match it to one of the names recorded on the excellent Balls Pond Road Burial Ground site but we feel we would be short-changing researchers across the world, who may have a personal interest in this individual, if we didn't work overtime to uncover at least a trace of the original inscription. So another day passes and the unprocessed pile of photographs in the "in-tray" is still way higher than the few completed and ready to upload onto the site. We had hoped to have Balls Pond completed by the end of August - but, like an ill-functioning Government Department, I don't see us meeting our targets! With luck we'll be finished by the end of this year - that is, the secular one that finishes 31st December 2009, not the Hebrew one that finishes mid September!
ALS

Brady Street Jewish Cemetery - a success story!

When we first visited Brady Street Jewish Cemetery back in May 2007 we took photos of the memorial to Miriam Levy, a rare, perhaps unique, example of a Jewish memorial with a bust of a woman. This, presumably is an actual likeness of Miriam, who has been described as a welfare worker who opened the first soup kitchens in the East End.

Unfortunately our original photos were not especially clear; it was a very sunny day and the light and shade made reading the worn inscription almost impossible. So when we heard that Brady was to be opened for a day in April '09 we jumped at the chance of a return visit, eager to finally be able to read the full inscription. Well, hopeful at any rate!

Brady Street is normally locked and the visit was made possible by Babs, a British-Jewry member, who lives in Australia and had found the tombstone of her 5 x great-grandfather, Nathan Raphael (1726 - 21 Sep 1808) on GenPals website.

On her visit to Brady in 2008, she had been unable to find the tombstone so, when the opportunity to visit London arose in April '09, Babs contacted the United Synagogue and organised for the cemetery to be opened. Here is an extract from her marvellous family newsletter:

... the morning of Sunday, 19th April 2009, was set for a reunion of some distant cousins at the grave of their common ancestor - just over 200 years after his death! I suddenly became very nervous, what if I still couldn’t find the grave? I anxiously re-checked Gaby’s instructions and downloaded pictures of the tombstones she said were positioned either side of Nathan’s. Both these tombstones were quite distinctive, with relatively clear inscriptions. I felt reassured; surely I had enough information to ensure success this time round. At the very least, there were several other graves of family members to visit I told myself while trying not to hyper-ventilate.

..... our group decided it might be quicker to split up and search separately. It was not long thereafter that my eagle-eyed husband triumphantly announced “I’ve found it!” As one, my newly-met cousins and I rushed to the scene. The tombstones on either side, we all agreed, clearly matched those identified by Gaby as Nathan’s “neighbours”.

Sunday 19th April was a truly memorable day for me too, it was an absolute pleasure to meet Babs and know that we had helped her locate the burial place of her ancestor and especially to walk around the cemetery seeing descendants visiting the graves of their ancestors. I fully understand the need to keep the cemetery closed but seeing several groups of families paying their respects to the those that died many years ago was a wonderful thing: how long has it been since these graves have been visited by family members?

Babs' visit was particularly special, as she had brought some polished stones from the Orange region NSW, Australia, where Nathan Raphael's grandson and patriarch of the Australian branch of the family is buried, to leave as a token of her visit.

Here is a photo (copyright K O'Connor) taken by Babs' husband, with Babs, and family members John and Julia, the polished stones visible on the top of the tombstone.

My time at Brady was nearly up so we took some photos of Miriam Levy's memorial from as many angles as possible and this time we were successful: the details of the main inscription are now included on the entry found here. As yet the details of her life and her involvement with the East End soup kitchens elude us.

Balls Pond Road London? Or Ayres Quay Sunderland? Which is the true burial place of David Johnasson?

The cemetery at Ayres Quay Jewish Cemetery in Sunderland, presently classed by Jewish Heritage UK as a "site at Risk" was closed in 1856.

However, a space was reserved for a memorial to David Johnasson, a local landowner, ship owner, owner of the Usworth Colliery, and a senior member of the community, who died in London on 25th July 1859.

Only a stump remains of the once imposing obelisk, raised in his memory by his children, but earlier photographs can be seen here.

David Johnasson (Jonassohn) appears to have been quite out of the usual run of early nineteenth century Anglo-Jewry.

A notice of his marriage in Hamburg to Charlotte, 2nd daughter of Mr. J Bouer of that city, appears in the Newcastle Courant on 15 July 1826, suggesting that, although still a young man, he was already an established figure in the North of England.

By the mid 1840's he was already the ow ner of an estate which included a fine property, Usworth House, later known as Usworth Hall and it was here that he sunk a Colliery which he ran for many years.


Pit accidents were far from rare at this time; how often this was due to lack of knowledge, and technology and how much to bad management, is hard to judge.

The raw facts reported by the Durham Mining Museum show that the one at Usworth on 5 June 1850 was caused by a naked flame resulting in the deaths of 12 men and one boy, from the 160 working the pit that day.

But the boss, David Jonassohn, was also possessed of a paternalistic streak. The Preston Guardian of 8th Feb 1851 reports:

".....Mr David Jonassohn and Partners have erected a large and commodious Chapel with school rooms for the alternate use of the Wesleyans and the Primitive Methodists".

In similar benevolent fashion, the following week, the Newcastle Courant reports that on the occasion of her marriage, the eldest daughter of D. Jonassohn Esq. of Usworth Place gave half-a-crown each (2 shillings and sixpence) to the poor widows and old people in the villages of Usworth and Usworth Colliery as well as £2 to the inmates of the Chester-le-Street workhouse.

David Jonassohn was still living at Usworth in 1851, but evidently moved to London some time prior to his death there on 25 July 1859. The stone, erected in his memory in the Balls Pond Road Jewish cemetery, is still standing.


In the English inscription, he is identified as DAVID JONASSOHN Esq. of Usworth DURHAM. and, this is repeated in the Hebrew inscription:

resident Durham

So, it would seem that, whilst his physical remains were laid to rest in London, his heart belonged to the North East of England.

Further information on the Jonassohn family can be found on www.genpals.com Cemetery Project see here. Our thanks to Shaun for the use his photos.
ALS

More Levy's than Cohen's on GenPals

A quick review of the numbers and names on GenPals Cemetery Project.

Since we launched the site with 500 entries back in Nov 2007 it has grown and grown!

There are now over 8,000 individuals listed, so we thought it would be interesting to look at the top ten family names:

1. Levy
2. Cohen
3. Jacobs
4. Harris
5. Davis
6. Nathan
7. Solomon
8. Hart
9. Isaacs
10. Moses

NB. Because we list women under their maiden names there are a large number with no family name on the site plus there are those where only the Hebrew name has been identified on the tombstone.

There are 7 individuals who died at the grand age of 100 years or more and 3 aged 99 years.

We are currently working on tombstones from Balls Pond Jewish cemetery in London and Nuevo Jewish Cemetery so expect the numbers to increase over the next month or so. Both of these cemeteries have been fully photographed as have Brady Street Jewish Cemetery, Brompton (Fulham Rd) Jewish Cemetery, Bancroft Rd Jewish Cemetery and Lauriston Road Jewish Cemetery.

We don't just cover London, see here for a full list of the cemeteries recorded on the site.

GenPals Cemetery Project: Cut Off date

We have been asked many times why we do not include photos of headstones where the individual died after 1928.

We took the view when we started this project, that while we want to record the information that has been inscribed on headstones and make that information freely available, we would need to keep in mind the feelings of living decsendants and also whether the information could be used for identity fraud. While the detail is so useful for genealogy its the detail that can cause problems.

I feel sure that genealogists have realised that when asked for 'mother's maiden name' its best to make it up or use a spelling variation or not publish their immediate family details and of course many institutions have now moved away from that type of security question.

As far as we are concerned its better to be safe than sorry and trust that users and contributors to the GenPals Cemetery project understand, respect and accept that this is how it is.