Picot burial records
Philippe Picot
burial records index |
 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. This page provides an index to the Livres de Remarques of Philippe Picot's business.  1861 advertisement for the business These cover the dates 1842 to 1876 and are particularly important because they date from the beginning of the period when more and more non-Anglican churches began to keep their own records. The records from these churches have not yet been transcribed and made available online, but the undertakers' records, which cover all denominations, 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.  |
Picot's Livres de Remarques
The books can be viewed on line or downloaded, and are presented on the website in nine sets. Each set has a downloadable index. This index gives a reference number, surname and forenames, and maiden names and previous married names for married women.
It can be a lengthy process searching the Archive website 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 11,500-plus records, with the year of burial included. Using the year of death and record number shown in our index should enable researchers to easily locate desired records.
We are adding indexes of records for a number of undertakers, for individual families included in our 1,200-plus family pages, which include all the island's most important families.
The Archive indexes contain some 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 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.
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.
Index
We have completed an index for the combined burial records of all the major undertakers between 1820 and 1978. We will index the Picot records separately in due course, but any record in the Picot registers can be found in the main index
