The Society of Genealogists

St Leonard's Shoreditch Burials 1805-1858 and Workhouse Deaths 1820-1828

The St Leonard's Shoreditch Burial index, compiled by the Society of Genealogists, covers 38,246 burials in this parish, for the period 1805-1858.

There are separate burial registers for St Leonard's Workhouse but the bodies of many people who died there were claimed by relatives and buried in St Leonard's churchyard. These burials are recorded in the registers of the parish church and are included in this index.

The St Leonard's Workhouse Deaths index contains 702 records for the period 1820-1828. Earlier entries relating to adult males buried at Shoreditch between 1560 and 1745 can be found in Boyd's London Burials.

The elegant church of St Leonard's Shoreditch was built between 1736 and 1740 after the tower of its predecessor collapsed during a service in 1716. There had been a church on this spot since the 12th century and in the Elizabethan period it was used by many actors working at the two nearby theatres. The grave of Shakespeare's friend and builder of the Curtain Theatre, Richard Burbage, is in the churchyard.

By the middle of the 18th century the parish had a population of about 10,000. The 1801 census showed an increase to 35,000 in just 50 years. Between 1822 and 1827 the 'Waterloo churches' of St John Hoxton and St Mary Haggerston were built to cope with the rising population and in 1830 they were spilt off to form two new ecclesiastical parishes. In 1831 the population was recorded as 69,000. A third ecclesiastical parish was created in 1841: St James, Curtain Road. By 1851 the population had risen to 109,000.

Overcrowding, disease and poverty were so great in this area that the Shoreditch vestry levied a special poor rate in 1774 to create a workhouse for the parish. This was the first in London to have a separate isolation ward to house those with infectious diseases, in particular those infected with cholera. The parish burial registers for the 41 years from 1813 to 1853 record the deaths of 32,684 individuals. The average number per year was about 800 but during the cholera epidemics of 1832 and 1849 the number shot up to over 1,000.

Here you can see a sample St Leonard's Shoreditch burial record - click on the image to enlarge it:

Acknowledgments

The Society of Genealogists would like to express its gratitude to Stephen Freeth, formerly keeper of manuscripts at the Guildhall Library, for permission to buy film copies of the burial registers and allowing the society to have them scanned for volunteer transcribers to work on at home. Thanks go to Colin Allen, project coordinator and indexer, David Squire for analysis of indexing issues, suggestions for dealing with them and for indexing, Carole Powell and Nick Spence for indexing.