Nelson City Council

Searching for Nelson City burial plots and funeral notices

As a result of a recently implemented project, Nelson City Council staff now have the ability to pinpoint the location of individual burial plots in the Nelson City cemeteries. This burial plot search service is available at the Nelson City Council Service Centre or at the Information Services Desk at Elma Turner Library.

 Nelson City maintains a cemeteries database, which is a publicly accessible database of cemetery records available on the  Council website.

 Searches can be made by surname, date or keyword.

•  If you are unsure of the exact spelling when doing a search it is best to use the keyword option as a surname search only brings up exact matches.  Also true of hyphenated names or where a person is known by two names.  The first few letters followed by * is also an option. 

The reference point for a burial plot search is the Record No, which can be found on the cemeteries database,  for example:  WKCE08049.

• Where a record is just numerical (eg 1234) or O_ followed by numbers (eg O_1234) the record is a cremation rather than an interment. 

Death notices

The cemeteries database can also be used to help locate death notices in Nelson newspapers.  The Interment Date and the Date Deceased are both reference points which can be used for searching for this information.

Historic Nelson papers can be found on microfilm at the Elma Turner Library, or prior to 1910 only, online through Papers Past .

The death notices frequently have additional information on family members related to the deceased.

Note:

Council is obliged to record burial dates rather than death dates, although some records do have both.

See past Heritage News items.