Quick links for this page: Cover • Introduction • How you can help • Accuracy • Main text • Indices
THE following pages consist of a verbatim copy of all the Monuments and Gravestones in Ripon Cathedral and its Burial-ground on the South and East of that edifice. They were first copied without any intention of publishing them ; but merely for the sake of preserving them from that oblivion to which these memorials of our forefathers are fast hastening. Finding, however, that there was a strong inclination on the part of those whose relatives "sleep their long last sleep," in and around the "Old Minstre" of Ripon, and the public generally, to possess a copy of its numerous sepulchral memorials, the copyist, after ascertaining that such an undertaking would at all events pay the expenses of the printing, at once decided to lay his labours before the public. This sufficiently explains the why and the wherefore of the publication.
T. WILSON.
Ripon, March 1st, 1847.
This book contains details of the various monumental inscriptions at Ripon Cathedral, England, as they stood in 1847 (when the book was published). It is intended as a genealogy aid. All pages have been scanned into GIF format, and some have been processed into text (i.e. searchable using the "search" facility of your browser, and much smaller than the graphic version). Note that although the copyright on the original book has now expired, copyright does exist on these scanned images and transcriptions (see below). This is to avoid the work, done voluntarily, being commercially exploited.
Many people have helped in the initial transcription of the book's pages into text already.
Your assistance in checking and double-checking these transcriptions would be much appreciated, with a view to the whole text being available as a single html document enabling you and others to find the information you need very quickly.
If you would like to "Sponsor" a page, please carefully check a whole page at a time against the GIF, and send your results - please list the errors, rather than sending the whole page - to riponmi AT nwdb.co.uk (apologies for writing the address like that, I'm avoiding spammers), also remember to say what page it is, and whether there were any unclear words that need to be checked against the original book. I can then fix the errors found. If you fully check a page and find no errors, please send that result too.
All transcribed pages are rated in terms of how many checks have been done on the text, and a letter indicating the method of transcription. The letter is E for "By eye", O for "OCR" (Optical Character Recognition). Thus E2 would mean that a page has been scanned by eye, with 2 checks.
Coming back to this project after a long gap and doing checks on a couple of pages I see that the original can have typos: Where these obviously are typos and not for example an older spelling of a word it feels fine to correct these; some corrections are noted on this separate page; also there are some notes on names that have been hyphenated where they appear across lines: It is sometimes not obvious whether the name is naturally hyphenated.
Notes on layout, hyphenation and formatting: The text version will ultimately be a single continuous html document, thus all headers and printer's marks will be removed from the text version. Remember that this detail can always be seen in the GIF version. For hyphenation, where a name spans 2 lines, as in "Hob- green" on page 3, the form that appears best is used: A list of all such split words is given at the end of this page.
Once the transcription and checking processes are completed, I will put the whole text as a html file here. Then there's a pile of more old books to consider...
Note that the gifs are actually "Transparent" - I screwed up! For this reason the GIFs are "Wrapped" with tiny html files such that the text (transparent) is black. This should work for most browsers, hopefully including yours...
All pages are scanned at 300dpi and trimmed to the text or picture part - including any printers marks; GIFs are typically about 60KByte in size (reckon on a minute to load a page with a reasonable modem). I've scanned the pictures in the book at other resolutions and as JPEGs, which are prettier...
You will notice that all pages are also available at half size. This does not improve the download time, since the same graphics file is used. The only difference is that the browser is instructed to reduce the size of the graphic. You may find the pages at half size more convenient to read on your monitor.
Subject to this paragraph being retained unaltered, and being prominently displayed, with any extract or copy you make of this work: This work may be freely copied/distributed for private, non-commercial use only. It is copyright © of the various people who have contributed to its creation, and intended as a research tool, particularly for genealogical purposes. Find the 'Original' at http://riponmi.nwdb.co.uk/.
Obviously, once the whole book is in html form, you can just ask your browser to search the whole text - and that will give you the most complete result. Before then, however, use the book's indices, which list the surnames in the book: The Index to the Cathedral is on pages 105 to 109; The Index to the Monuments, Tombs and Headstones in the Church-yard is on pages 109 to 122. These indices give the item number, which are the numbers that appear after the page numbers below.
Note that additional unindexed names appear in the Appendix, on pages 97 to 104. Furthermore, there are people that appear in the book that aren't indexed - for a very good example, see No. 40 on page 10. The deceased (Ann Williamson) appears in the index, but her parents (John and Margaret Stevenson) don't, since they're not buried with her. Finally some may like to know the names that appear in very small writing in 2 of the illustrations. They are: Page 3 - J.K.Walbaam; E.M.Williams, page 23 - Seares & Williams S.
Clearly there are further MIs that aren't referenced here because the person died subsequently to the MIs here being recorded. On this subject John Hebden writes:
Thought you should know that about 20 years ago the late Miss Inchbold updated the memorials in Ripon Cathedral, the list being available in Ripon library. For outside grass has obviously grown over many of the older graves. A new section was opened in the 1860s, the burial register giving row and number for the grave. Unfortunately you have to guess which way the rows run. The mfiche of the registers records burials to 1881.
The last update occurred on or after: 10th April 2018.
