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The Early History of Ipswich General Cemetery (Transcription)
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Melanie: Where were people being buried in Ipswich prior to the opening of the cemetery?
Ashley: A lot of people were buried on their properties. Because they didn't have refrigeration in those days, and it was only horse-drawn conveyances for most of the people, if they died on their property they tend to be buried on the property. Church grounds had burials throughout Ipswich at the time.
Do you know which churches were doing those?
Churches like the the Primitive Methodists in Redbank Plains, which is now associated with the school there, they've definitely had about 12 burials at the back of their church. Various Methodist Churches around have also had burials.
When Henry Wade did his survey of Ipswich, he identified the site which would become the General Cemetery as a cemetery site. With the location of the cemetery, why did Henry Wade locate it there?
I don't know the exact reason it was chosen, but I suspect it would be its closeness to the city centre at the time. It was within easy carriage ride to that location.
It was considered reasonably remote in those days, so it wasn't going to interfere with any commercial or residential developments that were going on at the time.
In those days it would have been considered remote enough but accessible and so that's why they went there.
Can you tell me about that first cemetery from 1842?
The first cemetery is actually located within the existing cemetery and is in the north east quadrant of the cemetery. We don't have a lot of information about that because it was before the days that records were kept - they were kept by the church.
The original burial ground wasn't quite orientated the same way as the existing cemetery, but as the cemetery expanded, in the early part of the 20th century, it just became incorporated into the cemetery at the time.
Why did they stop using that first ground?
They didn't really stop using it, it was more the case it was full, so they then had to expand the cemetery and they had to get government approval and I recall seeing some minutes, published minutes of the Trust at the time, to say that the churches, to say they needed more land and that was in 1913, that was the case. They then got the extra land and divided the area up into their denominational groups.
We had the first cemetery was1842 to 1855, the second burial ground 1855 to 1868, and the third one in 1868. Can you tell me about the expanded site?
The expanded site that you see now, pretty much as you see now, is divided along denominational lines - it's something we don't do these days. It just kept accepting burials up until the early 1970s we had 1978 it was the last one and that cemetery then closed, so there are no new burials in that cemetery at all.
The first recorded burial in the cemetery is 1868 but we know that burials occurred in that ground from 1842. What happened then, that was under the jurisdiction of the churches and so there are no records up until 1868 when the Trust was formed and it was a trust of the cemetery not of the churches so that was when records started to be kept.