Locating the Dead – reconstructing burial registers from death registrations

Cleared scrub around the bed of the Cape River with views to Mount Davenport. (R. Daintree, 1868) SLQ Negative number: 63419

Queensland had numerous transient towns usually associated with mining or railway construction. Many disappeared completely leaving only a few traces of infrastructure and a cemetery of mostly unmarked graves. In most cases, the burial register has also disappeared along with the population.

In Queensland, it is possible, to a certain extent, to reconstruct the burial registers of cemeteries in a particular registration district as well as identifying the location of burials outside of gazetted cemeteries. The methodology outlined below has been developed for jurisdictions with decentralised registration districts with a centralised annual consolidation of district registrations. However, there are ideas which may assist you with your own burial register reconstruction project. I have worked on a number of such projects but for the purpose of this blog post, I will examine the gold mining district of Cape River and its associated settlement of Capeville in North Queensland.

The Cape River goldfield was gazetted by Richard Daintree on 12 June 1867 and by the end of the year there was an estimated 1000 residents including about 100 Chinese.[1] William Richard Onslow Hill was appointed as registrar to the newly established district of Cape River in 1868. He was succeeded by the overly-named William Skelton Ewbank Melbourne Charters in 1872.[2]

The first thing you need to do is to find some anchor points, i.e. people known to have died in the registration area. If there are any surviving headstones, the monumental inscriptions are a good place to start. Look up these deaths to find the registration number.

Also look for deaths in the births, deaths and marriages columns in the newspapers on Trove from the National Library of Australia.[3] Using the advanced search page, enter the place you are searching for and select family notices. This will be far from a complete search as dozens of goldfield newspapers have not survived to the present time and/or have not been digitised. Also, very few people had a funeral notice as these newspapers generally were published weekly and most of the deceased were buried on the day they died or the day after. A death notice was more common or an in memoriam notice which started to appear from the late-1860s. However, the deaths of the majority of people were not routinely advertised until well into the 20^th century.

Start an excel spreadsheet and arrange the death registrations in numerical order.  In Queensland, these are the annual consolidated number. The next step is to find the local registration number. This may require the expenditure of real money on death certificates as these have both the local and consolidated registration numbers but there are ways to minimise this expense.

Go to your nearest public library and see if there is on-site access to Ancestry.com. Navigate through the search options to Public Member Trees. Enter the name of the place you are looking for in the death field. There is no need to know the name of the deceased. In the case of Cape River, 25 separate family trees were identified including the Ah Gee and Ah Pan families. Locate and add the death registrations for these deaths to your spreadsheet. Many Ancestry members upload death certificates into the Gallery section of their family tree. Check for these to see if there is a district registration number.  If so, this becomes your anchor entry. Add a new column to your spreadsheet adjacent to the registration number for the local number and rows on either side of the anchor entry.

Do not worry about the death dates being in exact order. Family and friends had a few weeks to register the death without penalty. In rural areas, most deaths were registered in writing. Deaths were allocated registration numbers in order of receipt by the local registrar.

Let’s work through this example.

William Ah Pang died aged 10 months of convulsions on 13 October 1868 and was buried at the then Cape River Burial Ground, indicating that the cemetery was yet to be formally gazetted. William’s cumulative death registration number is 1868/C0105. Significantly, on his death certificate, his local registration number was 6, meaning that his was the sixth death registered in the new district of Cape River. By searching backward by number from 1868/C0105, it is possible to reconstruct the first five entries in the death registry giving this result.

Annual Cumulative	Local Registration	Last name	First name(s)	Date Died
1868/C0100	1	Matthews	Sarah Ann	1868-07-19
1868/C0101	2	Murphy	James	1868-07-30
1868/C0102	3	Gormon	Richard	1868-08-04
1868/C0103	4	Ah Fung	Joseph	1868-08-30
1868/C0104	5	Trebble	Mary	1868-08-28
1868/C0105	6	Ah Pang	William	1868-10-13

Not all of these of these people would have necessarily been buried in the Cape River burial ground. The only way to determine this is to purchase the death certificates, but at least now, the names of the deceased are known. As there were usually five registrations to the page, with the purchase of the certificate of Sarah Ann Matthews, the details of everyone up to and including Mary Trebble will be known. Similarly, the purchase of William Ah Pang’s certificate gives the details of the next five deaths.

As the population growth prior to the 1870s was not yet exponential, I decided to purchase the certificate of 1869/C0104 Ah Chuck in the hope that his low 100 number would also be in the Cape River registration district. It was. His local registration number was 18. So working forward and backward from 1869/C0104, I was able to identify another 28 people who died in the same registration district for that year, including eleven Chinese.

The above methodology will not be complete as people who died before the Cape River district was established would have been registered in Townsville. These would be a small number. Stillborn babies were not registered at all. However, it will go a long way towards identifying those buried at a particular site with hopefully, one day,  a collective named plaque erected in their memory.

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[1] Hooper, C.  (2011) Angor to Zillmanton: stories of North Queensland’s deserted towns. Townsville pp8-11

[2] Queensland Government Gazette

[3] For more detail on searching newspapers on Trove see https://trove.nla.gov.au/help/searching/advanced-search/newspapers-and-gazettes-advanced-search

Detailing the Dead – Combining the Queensland Chinese Death Index with burial records

South Rockhampton Cemetery (1992) Heritage branch staff – State of Queensland: Queensland Heritage Register: CC BY 3.0

In my previous post, I detailed how I constructed the Queensland Chinese Death Index (QCDI) by using the Queensland Government Family history research service.[1] This time I will show the value of sorting death registrations geographically to facilitate matching with cemetery burial records.

One of the most common problems for descendants of Chinese in Queensland is finding the death and/or burial of their ancestor. Often all the descendants know is a name like Ah Sam and the date and place of birth of the last child of a couple. If a marriage was registered and the certificate obtained, it may be possible to work out the year of birth. There are at least 260 men named Ah Sam in the Queensland Chinese Death Index. By working forward from the date of birth of the last child, a number of these deaths can be eliminated from the enquiry.

The next step is to start searching in cemeteries in the same registration district as the last birth. Prior to 1915, district registrars collated an annual return of burials which was sent to Brisbane and consolidated into an annual index. Queensland death certificates have two numbers; the local registration number which is the sequential number from the commencement of a particular registration district and the annual number which is allocated centrally and is the number which appears on the online index. By sorting the QCDI by registration number instead of by name, all the death registrations in a particular registration district will clump together.

For example, the Cape River Gold fields (a tributary of the Burdekin River) were established in 1867.[2] A local Registrar of Births, Death and Marriages was appointed in 1868. In the following year eleven Chinese deaths were registered including that of thirty-year old Ah Chuck who was the eighteenth death registered in the new registration district in February 1869.

Cemetery burial registers should at least include the age of the deceased. Some like South Rockhampton Cemetery, included the occupation and cause of death. I added this data to corresponding death registrations in the QCDI. This additional data, especially age, will help distinguish between deceased of the same name and assist researchers decide who is most likely to be their ancestor and order the death certificate. This methodology should improve the odds in ordering the correct death certificate.

Some cemetery registers will indicate that the deceased was Chinese. Without this notation in the Cooktown Cemetery burial register index, it would have been impossible to link 28-year-old labourer Henry Apps with the death registration of Hinny Appo. Both the death and burial occurred on 15 January 1889 which would have been the usual practice at the height of a North Queensland summer. The death registration number for Hinny Appo is within the sequence of the other burials at the Cooktown Cemetery in January 1889.

The unfamiliarity of Chinese names and the ‘thumbnail dipped in tar’ hand writing quality of both local registrars and cemetery sextons has led to mistranscription by indexers. A death was registered as Ah Yuck (1879/C304) and buried as Ah Tuck at the Cooktown Cemetery on 5 January 1879. These two entries for the same person would not be too far apart in a consolidated index to pick up by eye. However, Fong and Tong would appear pages or even volumes apart. The death of Fong Too (1868/C0898) was registered on 13 March 1868. The registration number placed the death in the Rockhampton Registration District. A burial of a Tong Too was found for the next day at the South Rockhampton Cemetery.

Traditionally family history records have been indexed by surname with a lesser emphasis on geographical location and date. In the case of Chinese family history, the name can be highly variable with the family name and given names often transposed or a nick name used. Names such as Ah Sam (often written with the character for the number 3) will not help family historians trace their family back to China. The actual name of Mary Watson’s servant Ah Sam, who perished with her in the Lizard Island incident in October 1881, was Chow Gee Kut. Ah Sam was his “Cooktown name.”[3]

I suggest that great emphasises be placed on geographical location and date over name to identify the dead.

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[1] Queensland Government Family history research service. http://www.familyhistory.bdm.qld.gov.au/

[2] Brisbane Courier 6 August 1867:3

[3] Morning Bulletin 24 March 1882:2

Naming the Dead – Introducing a resource for researching Chinese in Colonial Queensland

Cooktown Cemetery (2010) Heritage branch staff – State of Queensland: Queensland Heritage Register: CC BY 3.0, Link

A footnote in my PhD thesis concerning the funerary and burial practices of the Chinese in colonial Brisbane has expanded to an Australia-wide study into the topic. Journalists of the period devoted dozens of column inches describing in meticulous detail the “curious sight” of a Chinese funeral wending its way down the main street of their respective towns. However, the “defunct celestial” is rarely named.[1] With the aim of making my research as complete as possible, I endeavoured to name these dead and in the process created a resource which I named the Queensland Chinese Death Index (QCDI).

Naming the dead from a known date used to be a comparatively simple affair. In the early 2000s using the CD version of the Queensland Birth, Death & Marriage Registration Indexes with the Digger search engine, it was possible to search for all deaths on a particular date without needing to know the name. Then the Windows operating system was updated and the CD was not.  Many home-based researchers without recourse to IT departments with software engineering solutions lost the capacity to use this research methodology. Reading through a five year block of death registrations on microfiche was not a time efficient solution either.

When the Queensland BDMs first moved online, [2] there was the requirement to enter a surname, the very thing you were looking for. Then it became possible to search with a single name in any of the name fields and later by date. However, it wasn’t until the ability to search by registration number that the QCDI really started to take shape. I decided to compile the index sorted by death registration year/ number instead of by name. From this I noticed that these numbers started to cluster. Notable historical events such as the Palmer River gold rush (1873) became obvious with a spike in death registrations; dozens of consecutive numbers, indicating pages and pages of deaths registered for the newly arrived on the gold fields.

The QCDI currently stands at over 8600 death registrations from 1856 to 1985 in an Excel spreadsheet. How were the names collected? By entering “Ah” in any of the surname, given name, father’s name or mother’s name search fields, over 4100 incidences were returned.

In a previous iteration of the Queensland online registry, when the names of the parents are not known, the indexer added details to help identify the deceased. Often the age and country of birth was placed in the mother’s name field. By entering “China” in the mother’s name field, 1110 results were returned. While many of these overlapped with the “Ah” search, it did add a significant number of names to the list. Fortunately, I captured this data before it was removed in the subsequent update. It identified people who had sufficiently Anglicised their names to make them indistinguishable from the wider population such as John Warner who died in March 1877.[3]

Then it was a case of working through the most common Cantonese surnames (Wong, Chan, Kwan etc.) in each of the four name fields. This methodology also captured the deaths of Queensland-born children of Chinese fathers and the deaths of their non-Chinese wives who were also included.

Of course, not all Chinese deaths were registered. I have a number of burial registrations for cemeteries such Cooktown for which no equivalent  death registration has been found. I am currently creating a supplementary spreadsheet page to record these deaths.

The QCDI has already been successful in identifying the murdered Chinese crew of the Sing On Lee. [4] Marine deaths have an M before the registration number. When a cluster of consecutive M-registrations appeared in 1880, I ordered the death certificate for Ah See.[5] The advantage of pre-1890 death certificates is that you can receive up to five registrations per page. The cause of death for Ah Pow, Ah Nee, Ah Sam, Ah See and Ah Tung was “Murdered by New Guinea Natives at Aroa Bay.” All were fisherman with ages ranging between 24 and 31 born in Hong Kong. Captain Gin Hop of Cooktown, finally registered the deaths on 8 December 1880. Importantly for researchers of Chinese family history, Gin Hop signed his name in Chinese characters.

The advantage of the QCDI for family historians is that it significantly reduces the pool of similarly named individuals to research by concentrating on a smaller geographic area. Many descendants of Chinese in the colonial period know where their ancestor lived through the birth records of their children.

To be continued.

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[1] E.g. “A Chinese Funeral” [Clermont] Warwick Examiner and Times 11 September 1869:4

[2]  Queensland Government Family history research service. www.familyhistory.bdm.qld.gov.au

[3] Queensland Death Registration John Warner 1877/C611

[4] For description of similar incidents see Gapps, S. (2016) “Made in Australia: Chinese Junks and Sampans in Northern Queensland 1880 – 1910” in Grimwade, G., K. Rains and M. Dunk (eds) Rediscovered Past: Chinese Networks. East Ipswich, CHINA Inc. pp7-24.

[5] Queensland Death Registration 1880/M1758 Ah See.

Exhumation of Chinese from Queensland Cemeteries

Butt of licence issued to exhume James Duck Sing who drowned in the Clermont flood in 1916. [QSA Item ID 2760179]

I am presently indexing the Chinese names in the Exhumation Permit Receipt books issued by the Home Secretary’s Office located at the Queensland State Archives (www.archivessearch.qld.gov.au/series/S20957). The date range is 1919 to 1985 with gaps in the sequence and the most recent documented repatriation of Chinese remains was in June 1946 from Charters Towers. Although it is a small data set of fewer than 150 names, there are enough avenues of research to keep me busy for months.  

I arranged all of the data in an Excel spreadsheet which makes searching the data simpler. I have three columns for names, which are labelled last name, first names and English name. Chinese naming conventions perplexed official record creators, with the order reversed (sometimes several variations in the same document) or the ubiquitous “Ah” names. By dividing the Chinese names into two fields, you can sort each column in turn so similar sounding names cluster together.

I also added a column to capture date of death so I can calculate the interval before exhumation. On 27 November 1931, seventeen licences at the cost of £1 each were issued to Rockhampton undertaker Finlayson & McKenzie to perform exhumations from the South Rockhampton cemetery. Tommy Gunn was exhumed after 28 years while Chong Wah was exhumed just over the required five years after death.

So that Excel can sort entries into date order, I entered dates in the YYYY-MM-DD format. This way, records which were created alphabetically can now be examined chronologically to see if clusters emerge. For example, multiple deaths on the same day always warrant further investigation. Two exhumation permits were issued on the same day and with the same receipt number on 28 June 1921 for two Chinese from Clermont Cemetery, Central Queensland. There is nothing usual in this, the majority of exhumations were organised in batches generally five to ten years after the death. What is usual is the two deceased shared the same death date, 28 December 1916, when a disastrous flood in which at least 57 people drowned destroyed Clermont. In the extensive newspaper coverage, three Chinese names appeared; Duck Sing, Moo(n) Sing and Herbert Wing Long (Winglong). Yet only the first two named were to be exhumed and returned to China. They were market gardeners at Wolfgang Crossing who drowned trying to reach safety. The last named, despite being a younger man and a strong swimmer, drowned when he was entangled in a bolt of calico from a nearby shop. Herbert Wing Long had apparently already saved nine lives. His house in town also washed away. I paste the link to any newspaper reports in Trove into my spreadsheet so I do not have to search for them again (e.g. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/55167748) [Hint – you only need to copy the text to the left of the ? mark in the address bar of your search results.]

The index to the registry of Queensland deaths does not name parents for any of the three. However, the presence of a first name such as Herbert (opposed to the diminutives Charlie, Jimmy, Willie etc.) indicated to me that I was looking for an Australian-born person. On checking the birth index I found the 1887 Queensland birth of Herbert Long, son of Sarah Emily Howling and William Wing Long. At the time of his death, Herbert was married with three very young children. His widow soon moved away from Clermont, but his mother remained in Clermont for the rest of her life. His father moved to Toowoomba and traded as an herbalist under the name William Lee.

Returning to the exhumation licence permits, there is at least one instance of an Australian-born child arranging for the return of her father’s bones to China. In November 1927, Miss Grace Hocklien paid the £1 fee to have the bones of her father Chew Hocklien exhumed from the Cooktown Cemetery and returned to China. Unfortunately, this record set does not further specify the destination below the country level for any of the Chinese entries.

Well-known Warwick market gardener Sam War exhumed the bones of his Chinese-born wife “Jenny” Ah Nee in August 1918, five years after her death. The description of this event and other exhumations Sam War supervised took up many column inches in the Warwick Daily News, a source of valuable ethnographic data. Around 1929, Sam War returned to Canton and died there before 1934 leaving a grown-up family mainly in New South Wales.

The repatriation of the bones of ‘single’ Chinese born males back to their native villages, where there were relatives to venerate their memory, is an easy concept to understand. For me, an interesting avenue of research is to examine the prevalence of bone repatriation of the Chinese who had European wives and Australian-born children. Here there would be the tension between mourning traditions. After exhumation, grave visitation would no longer be possible by the family left behind in Australia. The next step will be to return to the spreadsheet and add a column to capture marriage data to see how many families had to make the decision to exhume or not.