Have you ever been to a cemetery and transcribed headstones? Who am I kidding … of course you have! Well I had too, but just to local cemeteries around my own state of South Australia. But on my trip to England earlier this year I got to not only visit so many ancestral towns, but also find and transcribe a bunch of ancestors headstones too. In this post I want to share with you the photos that I took at the little town of Berry Pomeroy in Devon, but first here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the town … “Berry Pomeroy is a village, civil parish and former manor in the former hundred of Haytor, today within South Hams district of Devon, England, about two miles east of Totnes. According to the 2001 census it had a population of 973.” This is a town that my Randell family has connections to, and as you would expect all genie-nuts to do, we made a bee-line straight to the local church looking for graves. Before I get into the graves themselves, I should start off by mentioning that my emigrating Randell ancestors all had their surname spelt as RANDELL. However their baptism records from Devon all clearly show RANDLE. And just to confuse the issue, the passenger list they’re on to me looks like RANDALL (you can view the “Hartley” passenger list from 1837 here). I don’t know why the change in spelling, but at least it’s been consistent since they came out. Now back to the headstones … this was a very cool cemetery. Lots of old graves that surround the church as I guess many are in England. Some were angled facing downwards, and while I thought that...
