Deceased Online adds Bolton burial records

Burial records for the seven cemeteries and a crematorium managed by Bolton Council, Lancashire in North West England are being added to www.deceasedonline.com.

All data for Tonge, the largest cemetery in the area, is now available with the rest to follow over the next 6-8 weeks. There will be nearly 450,000 burial and cremation records in all.

There are nearly 117,000 burials in Tonge Cemetery and the data comprises:

• Details of all graves indicating those buried in each grave;
• Scans of all burial registers;
• Over 4,000 photographs of memorials and headstones;
• Cemetery maps indicating grave locations.

Tonge Cemetery was the first municipal cemetery in Bolton when it opened on New Year’s Eve 1856 and was known as Bolton Cemetery. Tonge Cemetery has many impressive old memorials featuring prominent industrialists and other citizens from the area. Perhaps the most famous burial is that of Fred Dibnah, the steeplejack who became a cult TV personality with his programmes, made in the 1980s and 1990s, on industrial heritage and engineering mostly from the industrial revolution. Dibnah died in 2004 and his memorial, together with more than 4,000 others, is available in the data on Deceased Online.

Another tragic but curious burial record is that for Thomas McCarte (aka MacCarte) who died in 1872. The unfortunate Mr McCarte was a lion tamer with the visiting ‘Manders Menagerie’ and he had already lost an arm working in his chosen profession with Bell and Myers’ Circus at Liverpool. On 3 January 1872, Mr McCarte, billed as ‘Massarti the Lion Tamer’, commenced what was to be his final performance in Bolton. You can read a rather gruesome and detailed account of his confrontation with an ‘Asian Lion’ in a New York Times archive here.

Records for the following will be added to Deceased Online soon:

• Astley Bridge Cemetery, opened 1884;
• Blackrod Cemetery, opened 1887;
• Farnworth Cemetery, opened 1876;
• Heaton Cemetery, opened 1879;
• Horwich (Ridgemont) Cemetery, opened 1928;
• Westhaughton Cemetery, opened 1858;
• Overdale Crematorium, opened 1954.

Note

Bolton Council have requested that the addresses of the deceased not be shown in burial register records for the last 15 years. Users will not be able to view the most recent data until it is three years old to allow the families of the deceased time to inform their relatives.