FORD ROMAN CATHOLIC CEMETERY

 

Ford Cemetery was opened by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Liverpool in the 1850s. It is situated about five miles from Liverpool city centre in an area that was open countryside until well into the twentieth century. A 21 acre piece of land was acquired by Father Thomas Newsham to replace the graveyard at St Anthony's Church on Scotland Road and the cemetery was opened in 1855 but no records of burial exist prior to 1859. The original 21 acres have been added to several times over the years. There are just a handful of gravestones in Section 2A with a date earlier than 1859 but there is no way of knowing if they are in their original positions. Over 300,000 burials have taken place there since 1859.

The cemetery and the cemetery chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, opened in 1861, were designed by Augustus Welby Pugin. The chapel no longer exists and I am still looking for a photograph.

 

 

This website is not intended as an index to the burials at Ford Cemetery - it is rather an attempt to record the existing memorials whilst they are still standing and legible. Two-thirds of the burials at Ford were in public graves and so they never had a marker in the first place. One-third of burials were in purchased graves and these may at one time have had a memorial but not all of them still exist.

All the BURIAL REGISTERS are held at LIVERPOOL RECORD OFFICEThey have been completely indexed for the years 1859-1989. The index is available on microfiche and can be consulted at various record offices around Merseyside (HUYTON, CROSBY, ST HELENS) as well as at Liverpool.

The MICROFICHE INDEX can also be ordered for a small fee from any LDS (Mormon) Family History Centre. You can find the location of your NEAREST CENTRE here.

The HIBERNIA website also offers a free SEARCH SERVICE of the index.

 

This project will take some time to complete. The intention is to record the graves in the earliest sections first and to complete each section before moving on to the next. The exception to this are the War Graves that are scattered throughout the cemetery. However, if you have a specific grave number in one of the sections not yet transcribed that you'd like to have checked then please get in touch and if a stone exists I can take some photos for you. As a general rule I won't be uploading any photos of graves that are obviously still visited by relatives.

Please have a browse around the various sections and if you have any questions or suggestions to make the site easier to use then please don't hesitate to get in touch with me.

 

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