1913: The Weight-Matthews Survey of Eversholt Churchyard

Arthur Weight-Matthews surveyed the churchyard monuments in 1913. He produced rather idiosyncratic notes, nothing like as precise as Barbara Miles’s survey of 1996. However, it’s still very valuable, and includes some monuments that have since disappeared. Barbara left a copy of Weight-Matthews’s notes in her working draft.

Emrys Williams made the Weight-Matthews survey notes into a spreadsheet and cross-referenced that with Barbara’s survey and with the burial register.

The full spreadsheet is available at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1N0jNN0Il9uXT9NJxdtTJMkiqYl__MWZpOmvrRafwXdw/edit?usp=sharing

Google doesn’t index spreadsheet contents for searches, I think, so here are the names and dates of the people with monuments to their death in the Weight-Mattews survey. This represents only a small fraction of the total number of people buried, guessing from the burials records.The burials register shows 1034 people buried in the 1700-1799 century. This list of monuments has only 58 people. True, some monuments will have disappeared, but it seems that the rate of monument disappearance is actually quite low. Out of about 227 monuments seen in 1913, only 46 could not be found in 1996. In fact, many of those that disappeared were cast iron, which was popular in Victorian times but had crumbled to rust by 1996. There wouldn’t have been any cast iron monuments in 1700-1799. So, it does seem possible that less than 10% of burials ended up with a monument in 1700-1799.

For the full details of each monument, and mentions of some other people who are not buried, please look at the spreadsheet directly.

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