Graveyard Survey
Gravestone and Memorial Inscriptions: St Mary’s Olveston
A digital record
A project team from Olveston Parish Historical Society has transcribed and made a digital record of all the gravestone and memorial inscriptions in St Mary’s church and churchyard.
Weathering
Over time, some of the inscriptions have been lost, either in part or entirely, and are still being lost, as the memorials weather and decay. In many cases, the headstones are carved from sandstone which, over the course of time, loses its surface layer by a natural weathering process called ‘exfoliation’. It was in order to capture what remains, before further deterioration, that OPHS initiated this project.
Community effort
A terrific community effort, in which twenty local residents took part, has resulted in all the surviving information from the gravestones being transcribed and the positions of all the graves remapped.
The team has surveyed 958 graves and 76 ashes interments and photographed more than 300 memorials. We should like to photograph all the gravestones and memorials and put these images on the website alongside the transcriptions.
A rich resource
We hope that the information presented here will provide a rich resource for parish and family history.
What to do next
Please use the links below to find out more about the project and to discover how to search for a particular person’s grave. Clicking on each link will open a pdf file, which you can either look at online or which you can save to a Graveyard folder on your own computer and view from there.
Churchyard Plan (Zoom in, to read the numbers.)