St Mary's Burial Ground
St Mary's burial records go back to 1558, there are about 600 stones visible in the churchyard at the present time. Naturally in the past a lot of local farming families did not have the wherewithall to erect a stone for their loved ones. However, of those who did they have left a wonderful record of some of the families in this area. A very valuable resource for the Family Historian.
Over 6000 people are documented in the burial registers as having been buried at Lastingham. But we only have around 600 gravestones.
The graveyard was not only used for the deceased of the village of Lastingham, it also served Hutton le Hole, Appleton le Moors, Rosedale and Farndale until such time as these other parishes had their own burial ground.
The oldest legible stone in Lastingham dates back to 1701 and there rests the body of Ann Burton of Appleton le Moors. Sadly, a lot of the stones still standing are very difficult to decifer. We are very fortunate in Lastingham as we had a lady who transcribed the Memorial Inscriptions (MI's) on the stones back in 1986 and she wrote down all the MI's and indexed them all. She also made a detailed plan of the burial ground and numbered all the graves. There are sveral MI's inside the church in addition to those in the graveyard.
Since then the information has been updated to include more recent burials. A project to photograph and document all the information was completed during lockdown. There is now a file of all the gravestones, the inscriptions with photgraphs. This is available to view in church, along with the plan of the graveyard and the index.
We do have one of our gravestones which is classed as a 'Listed Monument'. The stone belongs to Thomas Flunders of Lastingham who was buried on January 5th 1779. The stone is quite unusual as it represents a door, complete with a keyhole. The one on the right is Sydney Ringers grave. He was the gentleman who restored the church in 1878 in memory of his daughter who choked on a cherry stone on her 7th birthday.
