Payn burial records 1820-1978

The records of Jersey's seven major undertakers from 1820 to the late 1970s are held by Jersey Archive and have been digitised and indexed by archive staff and volunteers. We previously provided family page listings of the records of Croad's, a single business, but have now combined all the records into a single new index and are progressively updating the lists in our family pages. The full records 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.

It can be a lengthy process searching for records because there are separate indexes for each funeral director and most do not give a date of burial. This means that 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 not only created a full A-Z index for all 66,000-plus records, with the year of burial included for the benefit of our users who have an Archive subscription, but we are adding indexes of records, such as this one, for individual families included in our 1,200-plus family pages, which include all the island's most important families.

This link is to the Archive website page containing links to the seven sets of records. The page will open for everybody but only subscribers will be able to view the records

Some records use page numbers and sequential record numbering. Most of the Archive indexes do not include dates. All our indexes and lists give dates, and having identified the undertaker and date of funeral from this listing you can then easily find the volume containing the record.

The Archive indexes contain some very 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 very 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. Variations of common names which may be correct are included at the end of family name indexes, and have been left in the full A-Z indexes.

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.

Please note that the work of updating all our family page burial lists to include all funeral directors is not yet complete, and some pages still link to an incomplete listing for a single business. Note also that there were other undertakers in business over the years whose records are not included in this collection. For families with a significant number of records we have created a separate page, but when there are only a few records the link may be to an A-Z index page, and you will need to scroll through the alphabetical listing to find the family you are interested in.

• Burial records: Our main index to undertakers' registers, cemetery records and gravestone images