Burial records V

The records of undertakers Pitcher and Le Quesne and some of their predecessors are held by Jersey Archive and are being digitised and indexed by archive staff and volunteers. The first to appear on their website are the Livres de Remarques of Croad's, the family undertaker's business established by William J Croad.

These cover the dates 1867 to 1962 and are available to subscribers to the Archive's online service. The entries within the volumes give vital family history information such as the name and age of the person buried, their immediate relations, the place and date of death, as well as place of burial - cemetery, location of grave and even the coffin's depth . Some records also give details of the deceased's occupation or public positions held.

The books can be viewed on line or downloaded, and are presented on the website in 14 sets, at present covering the period up to 1960. Each set is indexed in a downloadable index. This index gives a reference number, surname and forenames, and maiden names and previous married names for married women. There are also columns for titles of some of the deceased and additional remarks.

It can be a lengthy process searching for records because the indexes do not give a date of burial, so several volumes may have to be accessed when searching for details of an ancestor's burial. Although the Archive website has a search facility which allows a search for individual names, the results can include all manner of other records in their catalogue and, unless the exact spelling of a name is known, the required record will not be found.

Jerripedia has created a full A-Z index for all 23,000-plus records, with the year of burial included, for the benefit of our users who have an Archive subscription.

We are adding indexes of records, such as this one, for individual families included in our 1,200-plus family pages, which include all the island's most important families.

• This link is to the Archive website page containing links to the 14 sets of records. The page will open for everybody but only subscribers will be able to view the records

Page numbers are given for some records, including the earliest, for which record numbers were not sequential. From 1879 Croad's operated a new system of sequential numbering continuing year after year. Some numbers were duplicated and some sequences were not used, and page numbers were used to help locate these records. Using the year of death and record number shown in our index should enable researchers to easily locate desired records

The Archive indexes contain some very unusual spellings for common Jersey surnames. We are cross-checking these with the images of the undertaker's books and finding that most are errors of transcription, which can be corrected for our index, although the process of checking against the books is very time-consuming. Some of the handwriting in the books is very difficult to read, and there may also be errors in the entries. We are correcting names when we are entirely satisfied that a common surname has been wrongly entered or transcribed. Variations of common names which may be correct are included at the end of family name indexes, and will be left in the full A-Z indexes, when they are created during 2018.

Our advice is the same as it is with any other set of records included in Jerripedia. If you don't find an ancestor where you expect to, look for variations in spelling and, perhaps for names with or without prefixes, such as Le, La, L', de and du. Variations may appear next to records for names spelt in the standard form; they may also be some way out of sequence.