Sedgley Parish Graveyards

The following information is from Christine Buckley and/or Keith Poole...

Anglican Cemeteries

Anglican cemeteries in current All Saints' parish, Sedgley, are:

All Saints' churchyard: a few gravestones from 18th C, mostly 19th C (after the rebuilding of the church in 1826-9) with a few early 20th C added inscriptions.

Vicar Street cemetery: opened 1808, formally closed 1878, some burials afterwards in existing graves. Almost all gravestones cleared when Dudley took it over (it was like a jungle) 20-30 years ago.

These two locations are covered in one volume of monumental inscriptions (indexed), a copy of which held by Dudley Archives; it has a yellow cover. (May also be at Wolverhampton.) The transcript was made 20-30 years ago, and recorded what gravestones were left and legible then. The churchyard inscriptions (including monuments inside the church) are properly recorded; the Vicar Street ones were done by a job creation programme, and only record names and death dates. There's no layout key and halfway through the volume the sheets have got in a bit of a mess. The index is still just about usable -- at least the page numbers are in the right order.

Gospel End Street cemetery: mid 1870s to recent, with a very few burials continuing in existing graves. Good indexed transcription of what memorials remained and were legible 20-30 years ago, plans and grid layout, so locations can be identified, but bring your own machete. Copy at Dudley Archives, and I have one here at the vicarage with MS annotations of burials since the transcript was made. (This has a green cover.)

Many graves never had stones, and unless the inscriptions are recorded in these two volumes, there's no way of tracing exact location (e.g. through the burials register). At which point the various offshoots of the ancient parish were given burial rights, I don't know, but there is an agreement dated 1936 in All Saints' papers held at Coseley 're burial of parishioners of the parishes of All Saints, Sedgley, St Chad's, West Coseley, and St Mary the Virgin, Sedgley', so it sounds as if there was a bit of to-ing and fro-ing.

There are quite a few records of burials at Nonconformist chapels in the Sedgley area :-

Old Meeting House, Coseley. 1804 - 1837.
Cradley Baptist Chapel. 1805 - 1837.
Park Lane Chapel. 1797 - 1826.
Dudley Baptist Chapel. 1814 - 1837 (Deaths)
Old Meeting House. 1829 - 1831 (Funerals) 1833 - 18??(Burials)
Methodist New Connexion, Wolverhampton Street, Dudley. 1829 - 1837.

All these are on film No. 296 at Coseley Archives.

There are also churches and chapels in Upper and Lower Gornal, and in Ruiton, where people who had lived in Sedgley and its surroundings may have been buried.

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