Interment

The complete register of a municipal burial board's cemetery and crematorium — the authority that owns the ground, sells exclusive rights of burial in it, digs and records every interment, operates the crematorium and accounts for every set of ashes, licenses the memorials that stand on the graves, topple-tests them, and holds the registers that families search a century later. It is the authority on which grave, in whose right, for what term, who lies in it, to what depth, under which memorial, and what remains unsold. The signature surface is the lithographed cemetery plan itself, drawn as an Ordnance Survey sheet: eight lettered sections with their numbered plots, the chapel and the garden of remembrance, hatched paths, the north point, a scale bar in feet, and every space shaded for its state so the seventy-six spaces on the register are countable off the drawing before a single table is read. Beside it the Grave Space Register carries section, row and number, the grave type from lawn and kerbed to cremated-remains plot, children's section, woodland and vault, the dug depth in interments and how many of those are used, the remaining depth available, the ground conditions, and hard flags for FULL, RESERVED, UNSOLD, GROUND UNSUITABLE and WITHIN 30m OF A WATERCOURSE. Then the deeds: exclusive rights of burial with the deed number and grantee, the grant date, the term of fifty, seventy-five or ninety-nine years, the computed expiry with years remaining stated, assignment or transfer on the death of the grantee and the statutory declaration relied on, extensions of term purchased, and flags for RIGHT EXPIRED, EXPIRING WITHIN 24 MONTHS, GRANTEE DECEASED — RIGHT UNASSIGNED and NO DEED TRACED. The interment register is drawn as the ruled folio it is, with volume and page, entry number, name, age, last residence, date of death, date and hour of interment, the grave reference, the depth at which the coffin was placed and the depth of soil above it, the officiating minister and the funeral director, and the disposal authority seen before the ground was opened. Beyond them: cremations and ashes, holding the medical referee's authorisation, the cremation number and cremator, and then the ashes themselves accounted for one by one — collected under signature, scattered in the garden of remembrance at a named plot, interred in a cremated-remains plot, or retained with the retention period running and an unclaimed-ashes register listing every set still held and for how long; memorial permits with the mason and their registration, the memorial dimensions checked against that section's rules, the inscription proposed and the inscription approved, the foundation specification and the fixing system, and refusals with the reason recorded; memorial safety as the topple-testing programme, with the force applied in kilograms, the result from PASS to LAID FLAT, the notice served on the registered grave owner and the six-year re-inspection cycle; the bookings diary holding chapel services and graveside committals with the preparation time the grave-digging team needs before each and the conflicts that follow; exhumations with the licence and its conditions, the officers present, the destination and the re-interment entry made in consequence; grounds and monuments with the mowing cycle, subsidence and sunken-grave reports, dangerous trees, war graves maintained under agreement and listed monuments with their designation; the scale of fees with resident and non-resident rates and remission for the interment of a child; and the register of searches with the periods covered, the fee and the certified extract issued. Families get their own portal — find a grave by name and get its section, row and number, see the term remaining on a deed and extend it, apply for a memorial permit, book a committal. Drawn entirely in the idiom of Victorian burial-board register engraving crossed with Ordnance Survey churchyard plan lithography of 1855 to 1910: a pale laid ivory ground with a visible laid-line texture, deep slate-green-black ink, one oxblood reserved strictly for expired rights, exhumations and unstable memorials, one muted gold for the seal on a granted deed, engraved hairline double-rules and foliate corner ornament, drop caps opening every folio, copperplate small-caps column headings over ruled register leaves, corrections set sideways in the gutter exactly as a register records them, and a drawn wax-seal impression on the specimen deed. Both fold figures close as exact partitions of their stated totals. Zero photography, zero gradients — all imagery is hand-drawn inline SVG.