The Form and Scope of the Gazetteer

The gazetteer is a database. You can search for a mausoleum by name, location (city/town/village, London borough, county, region, cemetery), date, architect/designer, listed status and keyword. The database is designed to be interactive; please tell us if you have further information on any of the buildings concerned. Also, if you know of a mausoleum in Great Britain or Ireland which is not in the gazetteer please send us details so that it may be included at info@mmtrust.org.uk. All the entries provide the name, the location, the precise, or an approximate, date of the structure, its listed status and a comment on its condition. Where known, we have also included the name of the architect or designer, the history of the mausoleum and something about the person for whom it was built. But there are many gaps in our knowledge and if you have further information, please let the Editor know. We intend to update and improve the entries as we learn more about the buildings. We would also greatly appreciate your help in keeping our records on the condition of the mausolea up to date. So if you are aware that the condition of a mausoleum near you has changed since the Trust visited it - either for the better or for the worse - please tell the Editor about that as well.

A Note about Architects/Designers

In cases where we are not sure that the architect or designer mentioned in a gazetteer entry is the correct one, the name will be preceded by the word 'probably' or, if less certain, 'possibly'. Where the attribution is 'probable', the mausoleum will be included among the works which will come up if you search on the name of the architect concerned. If the attribution is merely 'possible', it will not do so. In this case, however, the name will come up, if you search by keyword. But whichever method you use, we suggest you check the status of the information afterwards by reading the entries in the gazetteer.

The Date Range

The dates of the mausolea covered in our survey range from the mid 17th century (1656) until the start of the 2nd World War (1939).

Searching by Date

Although in some cases we know the precise date of a mausoleum in others we do not. Where we are unsure we either put 'c.' ( circa, about) before the estimated date, or give a date range, such as '1835-1855'. But the search engine cannot distinguish between a definite and an approximate date. As a result it will treat an approximate date in the same way as a precise one. If faced with a date range it cannot cope at all so, in order to get round the problem, a 'mid date' has to be chosen. i.e. if the date range is 1835-1855 then the date in the search engine will be 1845. If you were to make a search for mausolea dated 1845, the buildings of this date would come up, along with any other mausoleum whose 'mid date' was 1845. However, given the uncertain nature of a considerable number of the dates in the gazetteer, you may find it more satisfactory to widen the range of your search date. You can do this by picking a date and then asking the database for all the mausolea built either 5, 10 or 20 years to either side of that date. It is also possible to search by century. But whichever method you adopt, it will be advisable to check the entries of the mausolea afterwards in order to gauge the accuracy or, in some cases, the degree of uncertainty, regarding the dates of the buildings concerned.

Acknowledgement

The trust is very much indebted to former trustees, Teresa and David Sladen, for cataloguing and assembling all the information in the Gazetteer and all the hard work in getting it onto our website from the hundreds of hand-written records stored in our archives. This could not have happened without them and we are exceedingly grateful.

The original website design of the gazetteer was funded by generous grants from the Marc Fitch Fund and a private donor.