A team of volunteers has uncovered hundreds of unrecorded graves in a previously overgrown churchyard.
Lindsay Sandford and husband Brian were inspired when struggling to find a specific grave in St Mary’s Old Town Churchyard in the Isles of Scilly.
Ms Sandford has now written three books detailing the previously largely unknown lives of people buried there.
She said: “It is not morbid, it is about their lives. It is very satisfying.”
The churchyard’s most famous resident is former prime minister Harold Wilson, but it was the lesser known headstones that caught the Sandfords’ imaginations.
Ms Sandford said: “He is well recorded so with respect he doesn’t need to be recorded by us. You could Google him and find out anything about him.
“But all the other people have just been forgotten.
“It hasn’t been a sad journey looking for them and finding out about them, but I hope people when they read the books and come for a little potter around, think ‘gosh, they weren’t just living off limpets, eating potatoes – some of them had really good, decent and interesting lives’.”
The project started during a coronavirus lockdown in 2021, when Mr and Mrs Sandford used their daily exercise allowance to search for a specific grave, but were unable to find it.
Ms Sandford said: “Brian my husband has quite advanced Alzheimer’s and we needed a project to get him out each morning. Two years later here we are – it is looking cared for and more easy to maintain.”
They started going to the church six mornings a week, and were then joined by her grandson Herbie, before other volunteers got involved.
She said: “Saturday morning became the morning that was centred on the children, and it just snowballed. It became really satisfying, and we were able to tidy the churchyard up.
“We’ve had a lot of support from local families. Some of the older Scillonians remember playing out here 70 years ago, and said it has just been derelict.”
She said Mr Sandford had worked on building projects on every other church in the islands, and helped the group get permission for the restoration work.
Two of the volunteers who are 15, Oliver and Daisy, have now used the project as the volunteer part of their Duke of Edinburgh’s Award schemes.
Oliver said: “Some of the things I’ve done are rebuilding a wall that had fallen down and uprighting some graves that had fallen over.”
By studying records of burial, marriage, and baptisms, Mrs Sandford has compiled three books detailing the lives of every headstone and plaque discovered.
She said the process had been “very satisfying”.
“Initially I thought it was going to be repetitive but I realised that no two graves are the same,” she said.
“The stories that have come out have just been remarkable.
“Whether they have come off a shipwreck and been buried here or a gold prospector from Scilly who went to California, Australia, South Africa, and then came home and retired. And this is typical. People from here had a good education and made the most of it, and I think that is amazing.”
She hopes the enthusiasm of the younger members of the team will help them to “take ownership” and keep the churchyard clear for future generations.
The project has been involved with clearing the area around the church, while the cemetery section is cared for by the Isles of Scilly Council.
It is not known how many people are buried there in total, but there are about 850 headstones and plaques.
Some of the graves have more than one body, and there are three known mass graves for some of the 335 people who died when the SS Schiller sank off Scilly in 1835.
Dorothy Agnes Paice, 22, and Sylvia Jenkin, 29, were killed in August 1941, when a German aircraft dropped a bomb on to a house on the island, called Bona Vista.
Shrapnel from the house remains lodged in the roof of another Church on St Mary’s.
She died aged three months on 1 October 1847.
The family was travelling back to England from Jamaica, where her father Charles Edward Fry was attorney and overseer of the Orange Valley Plantation. It was the second largest sugar plantation in Jamaica. She died on board the ship Calypso when close to the islands, and they brought her body ashore.
The grave was not previously recorded as the inscription only becomes visible in the early morning sunshine – and after it had been cleared by the volunteers.
Died 24 February 1784.
Born in London, she was a celebrated opera singer, and described as a sensation of her time. Returning from India on the packet ship Nancy, the ship was wrecked off Scilly.
She and her infant child died, and she was initially buried on the uninhabited island Rosevear close to Bishop’s Rock lighthouse.
The grave was then exhumed and reburied at Old Town churchyard. The original grave site is unknown but there is a brass plaque in her name on one of the terraces.
A ship’s captain, he was buried at Old Town on 20 January 1781.
The headstone had fallen over and was in bad condition, but further research found he was captured and ransomed by French pirates, who killed him.
The privateers were sponsored by the state, and set a ransom of 500 Guineas for Capt Lambton who was sailing The Stephenson from Bristol to Newcastle at the time.
The grave of former Prime Minister Harold Wilson is the biggest draw to the churchyard, but there is another government minister buried there.
Ray Gunter, from Wales, served in Mr Wilson’s cabinet as Minister of Labour and also served in the Ministry of Power in 1968, before resigning. He died in the cottage he owned on St Mary’s in 1977, aged 67.
Source – BBC News
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