Australian adventurers and Cornish commemoration

Some of the people who left Cornwall for Australia are

remembered with inscriptions in the land of their birth

Migration from Cornwall to other parts of the world is well-documented, and in the course of visiting varied churchyards across Cornwall to deliver tokens of remembrance on behalf of customers, I have been noticing that inscriptions to family members who died overseas is not uncommon.

The locations of the churchyards with inscription documented on Christine Uphill's database

A website attributed to Christine Uphill has a listing of headstone inscriptions from 19 cemeteries in Cornwall. 16 of these are in the mid and west Cornwall area, and three are in the east: their locations are shown on the map to the left.

The 16 cemeteries in mid and west Cornwall represent only 13% of the total burial sites here, but a review of the entries on Christine's database finds 18 people who passed away in Australia who are remembered on family headstones here in Cornwall. Christine's database - arranged by surname - can be accessed at: Cornish cemeteries (rootsweb.com).

I have located the places mentioned on the headstones on a navigable Google Map, which you can explore by clicking on the image below. For each entry, I've included the details of the family member mentioned, and their relationship to the family on the headstone. For each entry, I've linked a photograph of the setting, to give an impression of where the headstone is located, and a few entries have images of the actual headstone, if I've been in the area to take a picture.

It is wonderful to see how the strands of individual or family histories from Cornwall weave together and become 'local' history in other parts of the world.

Another of my blogs explores the Lavin family from Merther (near Truro), and this also had links to Australia. Find it in the list of blogs , and discover more tendrils of history reaching across the world!