St Luke, Lower Norwood, Surrey
(now St Luke, West Norwood, London SE27)

Burial Register, 1825-1894

The analysis of the Burial registers of St Luke, Lower Norwood has been prepared by Francis Howcutt and is also available on the Howcutt web site. The Norwood Society is grateful for permission to publish this work on the Society’s website so that it is available to a greater number of researchers.

The parish register records everyone buried at St Luke’s, the first burial being on 3 October 1825 and the final one on 7 September 1894. The majority were interred in the churchyard. However, some coffins were deposited in a crypt beneath the church building itself and are now stacked behind a wall at the southern end of that area. The churchyard has been legally closed, so no further burials may take place there apart from cremated remains.

At first, the only other burial ground in the neighbourhood was at the Independent (later Congregationalist) chapel in Chapel Road. However, from 1837 onwards burials also took place the South Metropolitan Cemetery, which is situated on the opposite side of Norwood High Street to St Luke’s.

The registers have been transcribed from a microfilm of the original book. Each page has space for eight burials, the information being set out in columns with these printed headings:

• Number
• Name
• Abode
• When buried
• Age
• By whom the ceremony was performed.

The final burial has the printed serial number 1386. However, only 1,383 burials are actually recorded. This is because:

• An extra entry on page 10 results in there being two burials with the number 81, so the second of them is transcribed as number 81.1
• Entry 1122 includes the burial of two people on 12 January 1862 - Lucy Frost and her infant child
• For an unknown reason, the spaces allocated on page 168 for numbers 1340 to 1344 inclusive were not used.

The handwriting is of very variable quality, with inkblots in some places to add to the confusion. Entries that were hard to read have been checked, where possible, with one or both of these sources:

• Civil registration death indexes are available online from July 1837 onwards until after the last burial at St Luke’s at FreeBMD. Doubtful entries in the burial register for that period have been checked there and are noted as “checked with FreeBMD”. In cases where details such as the exact age are different in that source to those in the parish register the discrepancies are noted in the transcript.
• Bishop’s transcripts. These contemporary annual copies of the register cover the years 1825-1844. They are kept at the London Metropolitan Archives (microfilm reference X014/063).

Download the burial records…

• St Luke’s, Norwood, Burials By Name (PDF)
• St Luke’s, Norwood, Burials By Date (PDF)

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