The upper churchyard at St. Peter's had been left untouched for around 40 years until in 2003 some volunteers from Festival Manchester came to Blackley and carried out some work here. Since then a very small band of volunteers have been working, usually one day per week, to try to claim the churchyard back from the jungle it had become, so that people could again visit their ancestors' graves and also use the space for walking and observing nature.
We have a blog diary and photographs of our work which can be read
here.
In addition to the restoration work, we are also gradually recording all of
the information on the gravestones and entering this onto a database in
order that we can give more help to people who are enquiring about their
ancestors who might be buried in the churchyard.
Please note that burials started in the upper churchyard in around 1890,
with previous burials being in the lower churchyard. There was some
overlap, however, and some burials continued in the lower churchyard after
that date. The lower churchyard was taken over by (the equivalent of)
Manchester City Council sometime during the 1960s and most of the
gravestones are no longer visible.
The burials registers since 1892 are held at St. Peters. For dates
before then, you can find some information on the Lancashire Online Parish Clerks website by clicking
here or the Family Search website by clicking here.
We have 17 Commonwealth War Graves in the upper churchyard at St. Peter's.
You can see a list here.
To view an aerial plan of the churchyard, please click here.
To view plans of the churchyard, showing some names, please click here.
To view an alphabetical list of the names already recorded,
click here.
If you would like to try to locate the grave of an ancestor
(since 1890 - please see information above),
please complete our form here. Or to offer to "adopt" a grave by taking care of it or volunteer to help with the restoration, please get in touch
using the contact us page.
A good forum system for genealogy can be found here.
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