Burials in Earlham Cemetery

Earlham Cemetery is owned and managed by Norwich City Council, whose website gives further information on burials including Natural Burials. The website has other useful information, including Cemetery rules and regulations, rules on Decorating graves at Christmas and Cemetery Opening Times.

Cremations in Earlham Crematorium

Earlham Crematorium, in the middle of Earlham Cemetery, is owned and run by Dignity plc, as is St. Faith’s Crematorium, just to the north of Norwich.

Historical Research

Friends of Earlham Cemetery do not hold details of burials in Earlham Cemetery.

If you are conducting research and wish to look at historic records of burials, Norfolk Record Office holds Burial Indexes (1856 – January 1998), Burial Registers (30 December 1885 – 31 December 1970) and Stillborn Registers (1928 – 1997), as well as cemetery records, plans and minute books.

For more information, contact the Norfolk Record Office at County Hall on 01603 222599 or email norfrec.nro@norfolk.gov.uk.

For more recent records, you will need to phone Norwich City Council switchboard on 0344 9803333 and ask for the Cemetery Department.

Both Norfolk Record Office and Norwich City Council can give you the section number of a burial and its plot number within the section. You can use the Cemetery map to find where the section is.

Norfolk Family History Society, which supplied us with this map, also has a project in progress that will transcribe all burials in Earlham Cemetery.

The Find A Grave and Billion Graves websites have records of burials in Earlham Cemetery. (Earlham Cemetery is called “Earlham Road Cemetery” on the Find A Grave website.)

War Graves in Earlham Cemetery

533 military casualties are buried in Earlham Cemetery, mostly in two areas of graves.

The oldest area, behind Helena Road, dates from 1875. It is arranged around the statue of “Armed Justice” (a.k.a. “The Spirit of the Army”) and includes burials from the 1870s until the First World War.

Further west, in burial Section 54, is a larger military burial area established in the First World War.

There are some war graves outside these areas too.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission website gives more details and allows a search of the records.

Other Information On Burials

Photos of Earlham Cemetery by Evelyn Simak
(Includes descriptions of some of the more interesting features of Earlham Cemetery, including graves)

What to do after someone dies
(Gov.uk website)

Gravestones HQ
(A useful guide to choosing a gravestone, by John Jenkins)

Norwich Funeralcare
(Part of the Co-op, whose Local Community Fund is raising money for hay raking in Earlham Cemetery)

Cemetery records and monumental inscriptions
(Norfolk Record Office Information Leaflet 47 – Adobe Acrobat (PDF) file)

Norwich Cemeteries
(National Archives catalogue)

Rosary Cemetery, Norwich

The Rosary Cemetery is Norwich City Council’s other cemetery. It was established in 1819, so predates Earlham Cemetery by some 37 years. The Friends of the Rosary Cemetery was established in 1998 and aims to promote the preservation, care and improvement of the Rosary Cemetery, as a place of historic and natural interest, and as a burial ground.

Colney Woodland Burials Park

Just outside Norwich, to the west on the B1108 Watton Road, there is another burial site, Greenacres Woodland Burials, Colney, run by GreenAcres Groups Ltd.