I grew familiar with churchyards and graveyards when I was working on Ignoring Gravity. Rose Haldane believes her birth mother is dead and so searches amongst the headstones at her local church.

If Deceased Online had existed when Rose was searching for her birth mother, perhaps she would simply have searched the database online. Deceased Online is the first central database of burial and cremation records in the UK, and records are constantly being added to its database. 

Read how I researched the graveyard scene in Ignoring Gravity.

So I tested the Deceased Online database with a random search for the name of my father. One exact match was found, a gravestone at St Maxentius, Bradshaw, Lancashire. Not my father, and not one of my relatives. Sadly my search went no further as this headstone is not part of the DO contract, so was available to view only by payment with the local authority: £2 to view the single headstone, or £15 to view all 511 headstones at this property. 

My second search was for ‘Rose Haldane’. More success here, 36 headstone collections were found for Haldane, various cemeteries, mostly in Scotland, with multiple headstones. The most, seven, are at Kilmaurs Cemetery in East Ayrshire. Again, I was unable to view the headstone without payment. If I was searching for real, I wouldn’t hesitate to pay the fee.

This post was inspired by the article ‘50 family history websites to watch in 2015’ in the January 2015 issue of the UK’s Who Do You Think You Are? magazine.

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:

Searching the #DeceasedOnline database of #graveyards https://wp.me/paZ3MX-1g via #AdoptionStoriesBlog