St Michael & All Angels: Thursley Churchyard Burials
- 23 hours ago
- 2 min read
Updated: 1 hour ago
Burial registers for St Michael & All Angels have been kept from the 17th century onwards and the oldest historical records are stored at the Surrey History Centre in Woking: https://www.surreycc.gov.uk/culture-and-leisure/history-centre
Current records
There is a Register of Burials kept in the church. The first burial, that of Arnold Henry Foster, took place on 15 December 1963. In total there are 318 burials recorded, the latest being that of Richard Charles Bates on 7 February 2026. The margin notes can denote if an individual is buried in the grave of another, almost invariably of the same family. DD denotes double depth.
The list of burials in the Register are in chronological order and are in the pdf below:
As this list of burials consists of photographs of each page of the Register of Burials it is not a searchable document. The majority of the information from the Register has now been transcribed into a Word document, and page 1 is shown below. The headings correspond to the Register of Burials with the page number column denoting the relevant page in the Register and the complete file (23 pages as at April 2025) is in the pdf below. Although the records should be chronological, this is not always the case, eg see page 13 of the Register, but the dates shown in the Register have been followed. NB: details of plot numbers etc. ie the margin notes, can be found only in the pdf of the Register of Burials.
In typing these records, sometimes a best-guess had to be made where the handwriting was difficult to decipher. If you are aware of an error please use the contact tab on the website: https://www.thursleyhistorysociety.org/
The work of the West Surrey Family History Society
The comprehensive file below was acquired from The Revd Peter Muir in the early 2010s, without any provenance or authorship indicated on the file. The presumed origin is from the West Surrey Family History Society survey, 1990 (the latest grave date in this file is 1982). The list refers to the churchyard Sections (or Divisions) A-F on the file ‘thursley stitched plan.jpeg’ dated 1993, by Tim Wilcock, where the boundaries are not at all clear.
An interpretation of these boundaries has been made by Sean Edwards on a file: ‘Thursley_Churchyard_20141121_divisions.tif’, extended to the west with Divisions ‘Gn’ and ‘Gs’, as a basis for Churchyard management.
This File
The ‘ThursleyStMichael.pdf’ file was converted to a word-processed file (WordPerfect) to allow formatting inconsistences and typos to be corrected, and to enable updating. Otherwise no other errors have been corrected. It has now been converted to Word and here is page 1:
NB: A great deal of work has been done, mainly by Amanda Flint and Alie Hanbury, to improve the accuracy of these records where they have been able to either correct or add to the entries on the gravestones. Their work has not yet been incorporated here, but over time their work will be reflected by updating the above file which should not, in the meantime, be regarded as approaching 100% accuracy.
Other efforts to map the churchyard:
