Family History
Do you have any known connection with our frontier town of Berwick-upon-Tweed? Any Burgons, Buglass’s, Darlings, Luggatts, Skellys or Younghusbands lurking in your ancestry? If so, the chances are you will have an ancestor or two buried in our churchyard.
The present Holy Trinity Church was completed in 1652 on a site adjacent to an earlier medieval church and, until the opening of the civic cemetery in 1856, was the only place in the town where a person of any denomination might be lawfully buried.
Records of death are found in the parish death registers at Berwick Records Office but indexed transcriptions of the wording on the headstones, the Monumental Inscriptions, are maintained by Holy Trinity Church. These inscriptions can often reveal a lot of information about a person’s life or family connections that can’t be found in the registers. The record is not complete; many families couldn’t afford a headstone, the weather has taken its toll, record keeping and headstone removal was haphazard, but details of approximately four thousand people who were buried there over the centuries have been kept. Information on baptisms and marriages at Holy Trinity are no longer kept by the church but can be viewed at Berwick Records Office.
Copies of the monumental inscriptions can be obtained direct from us; on a CD for £10.00 including postage or for £7.00 by file transfer. Please email us and we will reply as soon as we can. The information must not be used for commercial purposes.