LIST 60 - BURIALS - ST MARYS SYDNEY

 
 
The first burial was performed at St Marys on the 8th January 1821. During 
the remainder of the decade there were 399 burials performed.
 
The information recorded for each burial is as follows:
 burial date
 Christian name
 family name
 age
 abode
 civil status at time of death
 year and ship of arrival
 comments
 reference number
 
Various miscellaneous remarks in the register have been recorded as 'end-notes' 
at the bottom of the list.
 
The burials are listed in chronological order.
 
The Rev. John Joseph Therry arrived in the colony with Rev. Phillip Conolly 
in 1820 as the first two Roman Catholic chaplains to the colony. Rev Conolly 
left for Van Diemens Land in 1821 and took his registers with him. Whether 
there were any burials amongst his records is unknown. In any case there 
were only fifteen burials recorded up until 1826 when there was an 
explosion of burials to 116 in that year. In the absence of documentary 
confirmation it is assumed Rev Therry performed most of the burials.
 
As usual the Roman Catholic records are very haphazard in the early years. 
This may explain the high number of duplicate entries. Several different 
registers seem to have been in use or at least created and copied but most 
came from register coded "127". Combining them into one unified list has been 
something of a challenge.
 
The information collected on each burial was; name, date of burial, abode 
and from 1826 onward; age, ship of arrival and quality or profession although 
there were very few entries with information in this last column.
 
Unlike the Anglican parishes, St Mary's does not appear to have adopted the 
new pre-printed forms in 1826.
 
For some reason there were very many burials recorded for the hospital and 
the asylum perhaps this may be explained by a lack of a burial ground for the 
Roman Catholics at this stage in the colony's history.
 
For the colonial born their year of birth and parents names are recorded in 
the ship of arrival column.
 
It is hard to work out why there were so few burials conducted by the Roman 
Catholics when their baptisms were the most numerous of any church in the 
colony (25% of baptisms but only 8% of burials).
 
The reference number would direct the reader to the relevant entry in the 
original source document. The reference numbers for St Marys are not 
sequential, coming from several source documents. The numbers from the major 
register, coded "127", run from 0001 to 0362 at the end of the decade. 
 
To locate an entry on this list; firstly an alphabetical search on the name 
would be made on List 52 using code "SMS" from which the date of burial would 
be retrieved, secondly using the appropriate date, the burial would then 
be located on this list.

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