One of BACSA’s purposes is to record the names of those interred in South Asian cemeteries. This is a very important function. It is inevitable that many cemeteries will either return to nature or be built over with the growth of urban development, and therefore written records will be the only information posterity will have of the interments in those cemeteries. BACSA has published over forty Cemetery Record Books but these represent only a proportion of BACSA’s activity in this field as many of the Cemetery files in our Archives contain unpublished burial records ranging from voluminous lists to individual notes. Most of the Record Books and many of the unpublished lists include not just the names of those interred but also a transcript of the memorial inscription from which, of course, it is often possible to learn the names of the deceased’s relatives.
The Record Book indexes have been digitised and uploaded into the Burials database presented here. This database is in the process of being updated, and members will be informed of developments as they occur. The database also includes unpublished information on some individual cemeteries and a quantity of burial information gathered by two industrious genealogists, Lt-Col H K Percy-Smith and Brigadier Humphry Bullock, active in the 1930s, 40s and 50s.