Norfolk Family History Society Coat of Arms

Monumental Inscriptions Project

Monumental inscriptions, sometimes known as Memorial Inscriptions, are found on grave stones in Norfolk churchyards and cemeteries. They are also to be found inside churches and other buildings in the form of plaques, floor stones, stained glass windows, etc. War memorials etc are included. "Norfolk" in this connection means the county of Norfolk as it was at 1974.

The Monumental Inscriptions Projects main task is surveying burial grounds and entering the details into the Bedford Memorial computer program.

Project objectives

  1. To develop a recording system which will accommodate information from all sources and make it available to researchers
  2. To make paper copies of surveys available in the library at Kirby Hall
  3. To encourage the recording of the full wording of all kinds of Norfolk inscriptions
  4. To encourage the recording of inscriptions in such a way that they can be entered onto the NAOMI (National Archive of Memorial Inscriptions) database.

The full list of Monumental Inscriptions held by the Society is online. Here you will learn whether a survey has been carried out and if so when. In some cases it is not known whether all inscriptions in that parish are included in a survey.

All volunteers are welcome to participate in this project whether or not they are members of Norfolk Family History Society. Either email or write to the Mary Mitchell c/o Kirby Hall.

Conducting Monumental Inscriptions

For further reading on conducting a Monumental Inscription you may like to refer to these reference books. These are only useful as background reading and no one is expecting surveys of the standard suggested in some of these books. Our first objective is to record the full text of all Norfolk memorials. Crematoria are a low priority and cemeteries are useful places for beginners to practice but of a lower priority than churches and churchyards. Beginners may find "John Rayments Notes on recording monumental inscriptions" a useful reference (£ 1.00 at Kirby Hall or £ 1.50 by post)

All volunteers should print out a copy of our guidance notes. This guidance is written specifically to help make good use of a home computer, but if your survey is hand written you will need to know something about the NAOMI database in order to understand what to record.

The "Guidance Notes" are not instructions. How you go about recording and presenting your survey is largely up to you. For example you may find it simpler to draw a plan of a churchyard as part of your survey. See Producing a Plan of a Churchyard for some ideas.