Cheriton Road Cemetery

Profile manager: James Sutcliffe [send private message]

Profile

See the category for a listing of people buried in this cemetery.

Cemetery name: Cheriton Road Cemetery; also known as Folkestone Old Cemetery

Address: Cheriton Road, Folkestone, Kent, England

GPS Coordinates: 51.084481, 1.159563

Introduction

Cheriton Road Cemetery is a municipal cemetery in Folkestone, Kent, England. It contains 14,934 numbered graves but only 14,151 of these have been used for burials. There are known to be 26,471 people buried in the cemetery, with an additional 442 remembered on graves but not buried in the cemetery.

Friends of Old Folkestone Cemetery (FOFC)

The ‘Friends’ is a volunteer group formed in January 2016 to protect, preserve, and promote interest in this Victorian cemetery.

The group has its own website and Facebook Group.

The cemetery is on Find A Grave and BillionGraves and the group are adding photos on both sites.

History

The cemetery opened for burials in February 1857, although there was one burial in 1856 (James Pain Clark). The cemetery was extended to the east in 1891, increasing the number of grave spaces by roughly half from 9,867 to 14,934. The number of burials taking place dropped dramatically in 1935, burials from then were mostly in existing family graves and later only interments of ashes in existing family graves.

Maps

FOFC are working to photograph all the graves with memorials (and the scene of unmarked plots if requested) in the cemetery. We have produced maps of the cemetery to aid location of graves and indicate the progress of this exercise.

The maps use Google My Maps and are split into ten maps due to a limit on the number of markers that can appear on a single map. Please right-click (or long-press on a tablet) to open these in a new tab:

You can click on any marked grave to see who is buried or remembered there. For each person there is a link to their Find A Grave memorial and for each grave there is a link to an Ancestry search (or several searches if a single wildcard search would match other graves).

A growing number of the people on the maps also have links to their WikiTree profiles.

Register of Burials, Register of Graves, Interment Numbers and Grave Numbers

There are two sets of books for the cemetery:

• The Register of Burials with a record for each person's burial with an Interment Number and a reference to a Grave Number in the Register of Graves.
• The Register of Graves with a record for each grave listing each person buried in the grave with a reference to their Interment Number in the Register of Burials.

There are eight Register of Burials books:

Burials have continued since 2014 but are not available on Ancestry.

The entries in the Register of Burials are generally in order of date of burial. During some periods it appears that the entry information was provided by the people carrying out the ceremonies as and when (e.g. weekly), leading to the burials being out of order. At least one burial appears in the register several months after it took place.

The Register of Burials book layout has changed over the years, but each burial entry records the location of the grave by giving:

• Whether in consecrated or unconsecrated Ground.
• A Section Letter (A-F), these sections are vaguely defined and don’t really help locate a grave. The same grave seems to have a different section letter over time.
• A Grave Number (or grave space number). These are mostly unique locations within each of the consecrated and unconsecrated grounds. Consecrated grave numbers are from 1 to 10,116, unconsecrated grave numbers are from 1 to 4,817. To make each grave reference unique the maps use C or U as a prefix (e.g. U2639).
• An optional grave suffix (A or B). These generally indicate a subsequent burial in a grave, but in 22 known cases indicate an additional grave space added at the end of a row or column of graves, these may or may not be adjacent to the grave without the suffix. These 22 known graves are marked separately on the maps with the suffix (e.g. C6805B).

The first two Register of Burials books also contain a rarely used “No. of Grant” column. In book 2, the printed “No. of Grave” heading has been altered to “No. of Grant” by hand. The “No. of Grant” column is often mistranscribed on Ancestry as the grave number when it has been used.

On later plans of the cemetery it has been split into 30 numbered plots, these are much better defined than the lettered sections. The plot number is also used by the council on their official forms. In most areas of the cemetery these plots are separated by the main paths, or by the original boundary of the cemetery before it was extended. The plot can also change because the density of the grave columns changes (a child vs. adult plot) and some plots span paths (e.g. 12 and 13).

Nearly all the grave headstones in the cemetery face roughly east. The graves are arranged in rows (S to N) and columns (W to E). The graves are numbered sequentially within the plots along the columns from the SE corner. Some of this numbering spans plot boundaries, plots 12 and 13 are especially confusing. Columns can start or end part way into a plot, usually for one of two reasons:

• Paths around trees at the corners of the plots cutting into the roughly rectangular area.
• Tapering plots meaning more columns can be added as the plot widens.

The maps are split into blocks of grave numbers within the consecrated and unconsecrated grounds, the splits are at plot boundaries. Most plots are within one of the maps but plots 12 and 13 are both split roughly in half across two maps (at the path they both span).

Plot Listing

Completion status based upon photos on Find A Grave. Last updated 21 May 2021:

Burials by Plot by Year

Not including burials known to be interments of ashes. Last updated 27 Nov 2020: