Monday 16 January 2012

Carried along

Read an interesting parish burial entry today - 1818 Edinburgh St Cuthberts.
Past Edinburgh parish burial records have often been very informative with ages, occupations, causes of death, addresses etc, so when I tried interpreting an unlabelled column as a cause of death, my first guess was "strokes", but it did look rather more like "spokes" - which sounded rather painful !
Looking at the other entries on the page however I've deduced that they were recording how the dear departed was carried to their final resting place: "Arms", Shoulders", "hearse", "Coach" and "half spokes" being the other entries.
Expensive business this dying lark.
Robert FAIRBAIRN of St Leonard Street looked like his estate paid 5/3d for mortcloth, 2/4d for poor, 9d for "keepers", 1/- recorder, 1/- for grave digger and 1/3d for beadles.
The estate got off comparatively lightly with the one recorded has having the hearse (Lucy WALKER, relict of WALKER, writer) paying £1/-/6d for mortcloth, 5/- for turf, 4/8 for poor, £1/1/- for "Warrants", 1/6d for keepers, , 5/- for recorder, 1/- for grave digger, 1/3d for beadles (11/7d compared to £2/19/11d if I can still add in LSD)

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