Hello Sheffield Indexers.

Can I say what a fantastic body of work you have all put together and the site is a credit to you all. My question is that where you have burials that resulted from the air attacks on the 12th/13th December 1940, but names such as Jane and Lewis Baxter, Ethel Beardshaw and many others who show burials on the 31st March 1941 (and other later dates)but show no cemetery information, can you tell me where this date information was extracted from. Many of the casualties were from the Marples Hotel and it was known that remains were found and identified where possible, at a later date. Could the date of 31/03/1941 be a date where the commemoration at City Road Cemetery of some of the Blitz names were memorialised.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Regards

Steve

HI. If you look at the burial and click others in the grave it will give you the information I think you need.
Stay Safe Dave W

Hello Dave
Thanks for your reply. Clicking "similar in same grave" for Jane Baxter for example will bring up 476 results that are the same i.e where no cemetery information was found using the data from wherever that information was from, so possibly CWGC, but there are hundreds of names which must have come from the burial registers themselves as they have dates of burials which is only likely to have come from the cemetery registers themselves. Because of the way the site is set up, often a civilian casualty name will appear twice in the results, one with no cemetery information and one that does have the information, so the question still remains is how does the burial date of the 31st March 1941 appear so many times for deaths on the 12th and 13th December 1940 when there is nothing to suggest a cemetery, other than some being remembered on the CWD memorial at City Road, but being remembered on any memorial is no indication of a burial in that place.

Regards

Steve

Hi Steve
Looking on Sheffield Forum the consensus is that some were buried in mass grave in City Road Cemetery probably where the Garden of Remembrance is and some bodies were not recovered. If you look at the list some bodies were identified and some were not. Ethel Beardshaw was my DIL grandfather's first wife.

Hi Catherine

Many thanks for your reply. I picked Ethel because she was near the top of the list !!. Just to put this into some sort of context, we are a small group of researchers who are in the process of creating a database of the burials (where there were bodies or remains that were found) of the 69,000+ Civilian War Dead (CWD)of the UK and its protectorates. So far we have found around 23,000 by going out to look for them where we know they are, and searching through as many cemetery and church records that we can find. The frustrating thing is that all the CWD are known about and where their deaths were reported to, the actual burial or cremation locations are not. We are trying to work logistically so areas such as Coventry, Birmingham,Sheffield, London and so on where there were many CWD have been our priority, so we have come across this situation before where lots of people died in shelters, underground stations, pubs, schools and so on, and many cemetery records just sadly record an unknown male or female or simply unidentified remains buried on a certain date. Sadly this was common and the need to bury large numbers of casualties in a short space of time often meant mass occupancy plots or graves with hundreds or more interred there.
We suspected that this may be the case in Sheffield, but it is not limited to just the Marples Hotel. The Hermitage Inn in London Road had the same information but buried on the 30th September 1941 so perhaps there is some other reason, but the date in March came from somewhere.

Any ideas about Ethel's burial ?

Kind regards

Steve

In burials over to the left there is a mass grave containing 80 victims all buried 20 to 22 December 1940
You can identify it in Section 001 City Road, Grave Bricked Vault A
There is a second grave, Bricked Vault B containing 23 victims.
If you search in burials for Address *Marples*hotel* you see all 63 victims.
Dave

Hello Dave.

Thanks for that. We have identified those in the Brick Vaults, and adding Marples Hotel in the search box does bring up the numbers you suggest but it shows those because the search criteria used is Marples Hotel, but if you look down the list, not all have cemetery listings and others are buried in Bedford Cemetery, Darnall, Urmston, Rotherham and others, so unless we are missing something that links these all together other than Marples, it is not clear that all those listed here that don't have cemeteries are commemorated at City Road. Again the question is where did the date of the 31st March 1941 come from.

Regards

Steve

Hi Steve,

I can't remember now how we obtained the list and permission to transcribe the Civilian War Dead Index but I suspect we dealt with City Road and Sheffield Archives. Have you tried both places?

Just a suggestion..... After the blitz in 1940 which was pretty bad as you know it might have taken them weeks to cover the area of the damage and retrieve remains. They wouldn't have had the equipment and manpower to work at speed for remains.Hence the difference in dates.

Elaine site Admin.

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Hi Steve,

After further digging I found where we got it from.

It was transcribed by Christine Steer from Friends of Burngreave Cemetery.

If you look under our MI's you will find Christine's email address.

She transcribed it in 2015.

regards.

Elaine in Ottawa.

Instant Messenger: Skype

Hi Steve

I've emailed you

Carol

Hello Steve
It is so pleasing to hear from you. The Friends of Burngreave Cemetery were trying to compile a similar list as you because the CWGC names casualties and the date but not place of burial. We limited ourselves to Sheffield though. The list was compiled through a variety of sources, one of which a document given to us by Sheffield Bereavement Services. An office was set up in the Town Hall for people to report the missing and deceased.Ethel Beardshaw was on this list The rest of our list was composed by going through the Burial Registers, Newspapers etc.
The date 31 March 1941 is there because I was unable to leave the date of burial blank in the date column of the Excel Spreadsheet! Sorry to confuse you. Best wishes for your project
If you wish, please email me.
Christine Steers