Waking the Dead: Researching Memorials at Bath Abbey - PART ONE

I love a graveyard.

Something about walking through the hundreds of headstones, reading the epitaphs of people I never knew and will never know, uncovering stories in the names and dates - it makes me feel like I’m glimpsing into the past, and gives me a sense of connection to humanity as a whole.

I get the same feeling when in Bath Abbey, which isn’t surprising considering that the Abbey has almost 1500 memorials covering the walls and floors, and that for much of its 1300+ year history the Abbey was essentially a graveyard.

Figure 1: A few of the memorials in the Abbey

Fun fact: there were so many people buried in Bath Abbey (by some estimates up to 6000!) that in the 2010s the floor started to sink due to decomposition (okay, maybe more grim than fun). To address this, they launched the Footprint Project. An entire article could be written on this project alone (and has been written by various other (much more talented) writers across the internet), but in brief the £20 million project took up the floor, (safely) transferred all remains to the Abbey’s cemetery, laid better supports and installed underfloor heating using Bath’s famous spring water while they were at it.

(It also funded the creation of the Discovery Centre, a wonderful little museum about the history of the Abbey which I highly recommend).

Figure 2: Bath Abbey Discovery Centre*

Spying an opportunity with the Abbey cleared of pews and people, a team assembled to record all the writing on every single memorial before aging faded them further, which was especially a concern with some of the floor memorials. From these recordings, the Bath Abbey Memorials website was launched in 2023, collating the information of everyone memorialised in the Abbey and granting the public full access for the first time. This information, however, was basic - memorials rarely give life stories, so much of the site was limited to names and dates of death. To correct this, a new project was born, with lofty ambitions: to research and write a short biography for each of the near 2000 individuals memorialised.

This is where I come in (hold your applause).

Figure 3: Rest in peace, Cousin Throckmorton

I joined the project in October 2024, when I started volunteering with the Abbey’s archivist. Having finished my degree earlier that year, I was missing the trawling of historical sources that had come to dominate my life during my diss (something I never thought I’d say), and this was the perfect way to continue engaging with history while enacting everything I love about a graveyard.

After I’m given a name, my first step is to undergo a complex procedure known as ‘googling them.’ The dream scenario is finding a ready-made wikipedia page, although that’s only happened once (thank you very much diplomat Joseph Ewart). Sometimes more niche results appear, like the time I found my subject’s wife on a website dedicated to famous pastel artists (one of whom the subject’s wife had sat for). Much more commonly, little, if anything, shows up, and the hunt begins.

Figure 4: Thank you, Joseph Ewart, for having both a Wikipedia page and a book chapter written about you. Also for your diplomatting I guess.

My usual starting point is the favourite of all family tree hunters, Ancestry.com. For those unaware, Ancestry is a family history database, and as such is a great place to find the basics - baptisms, marriage records, burials. From this a rough sketch of their life starts to develop, but to flesh out that sketch I have to turn to other, more-detailed-but-less-common sources, depending on the subject. The British Newspaper Archive is a great resource, both for backing up births and deaths and for finding if the individual was ever newsworthy - if they ever placed an advert, entered local government, got a military promotion. More renowned individuals may have an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography (which is available for free at https://www.oxforddnb.com), while certain professions like lawyers often have online databases dedicated to members (or, in the case of soldiers, regimental history books). My personal favourite source, however, is a will.

Mostly found on Ancestry, these are an absolute pain to read, being handwritten and often with archaic and inconsistent spellings. However, once you start to decode the messy calligraphy (not that I can speak much considering how terrible my own writing is), it offers an unparalleled glimpse into the subject’s life - who they cared about, what they owned, what they thought important. For the vast majority of people, it is the only chance you get to actually read their own words. Plus, the pages of dense legalese and property detailing are worth it for the fragments of personal relationships and scant pieces of gossip that would otherwise have been lost to time. Why was this one daughter given more than her brothers? Who is this person with no clear link to the family who's been granted half the property? What did housekeeper Isabella Scott do to get struck off of her employer’s will?

That last one is an actual example which has haunted me ever since I uncovered it. While transcribing the will of my first research-ee, Lt. Col. Christie John Ewart, I saw that he had bequeathed £10 a year (nearly £900 today) to his ‘Old Servant Isabella… securing her life’ - a generous gesture, reflecting a close relationship between the two. However an amendment, written less than a year later, withdrew the allowance, instead saying that ‘Mrs Ewart may do with it whatsoever she pleases’ - a sharp turnaround. And what was it Isabella Scott did to cause such scorn, you ask? I wish I knew, but unfortunately this section seems to be written in especially un-decodable handwriting (perhaps Ewart was shaking with rage as he wrote). All I could figure out was that she had done something ‘very improperly’, but exactly what eludes me - the leading theory comes from a current coursemate, Rose, who drew out the words ‘conducted herself very improperly’, but nothing juicy is interpretable - or present in the first place. I fear this Great Scandal of Bath has been forever lost.

Figure 5: The offending passage of Ewart’s will - if any handwriting experts can uncover anything please let me know it’s been bugging me for over a year

What I love about the research is that every time it’s different - you go down different rabbit holes, find fresh new angles and, before you know it, you’ve assembled someone’s entire life in front of you (with the exception of the misconduct of their house staff, it appears). At least, sometimes you do. Sometimes, you get nothing - and unfortunately, you start to notice trends with who has less than others.

I’ve waffled on enough for one article, however. Stay tuned for Part Two, where I’ll dive into the disparity between results, and the wider issues around who gets researched - and what we can do about it.

- and if anyone can uncover more information about Isabella Scott, I’ll buy you a pint!

*Click here to see a timelapse of the Bath Abbey restoration project.

Ethan Cowie is currently a student on the MA Museum Studies programme at the University of Leicester.