Search Guernsey, Monumental Inscriptions

You will likely find information including -

• First name
• Last name
• Birth year
• Death year
• Death date
• Age at death
• Parish

We always encourage researchers to view the original record as you will find more, rich information

In 1780, the Constables and clergy of St Peter Port found themselves grappling with a growing problem: the parish's burial grounds were running out of space. The population was swelling, but the two tiny cemeteries—the Cimitière des Soeurs next to the Town Church and the Cimitière des Frères, on what is now St Julian’s Avenue—could barely accommodate the dead, with plots being reused time and again. The stench from the Town Church vaults, once reserved for the island's wealthiest, had become unbearable. Faced with this crisis, they began discussing the creation of a new cemetery, one where the poor and those not born in the parish could be buried. Thus, the Cimitière des Étrangers—or Strangers' Cemetery—was born, nestled on steep land bought from the Reverend William Dobrée, right next to Elizabeth College, and bordered to the east by the notoriously muddy Ruette Meurtrière, often impassable in wet weather.

In Guernsey, "Strangers" referred to anyone not born on the island. While they could own property here, it didn’t grant them automatic rights, and many were left to rely on the Strangers' Cemetery for their final resting place. Pressure to establish the cemetery also came from the military, who needed a space to bury soldiers from the garrison. But after fifty years, the Strangers' Cemetery was overshadowed by the grander, more organized Candie Cemetery, which was planned with much debate and inspiration from Paris’s Père Lachaise. However, the poor parishioners of St Peter Port were often priced out of Candie, and burials continued at the Strangers' Cemetery well into the 1880s. Even at Candie, coveted plots were bought for perpetuity, and bodies were sometimes exhumed and reburied in these more prestigious spaces, as people knew the cramped St Peter Port cemeteries rarely allowed the dead to rest in peace.

In 1807, Upland Road was built right through the Strangers' Cemetery, splitting it in two. The road was widened in 1830, and many graves were disturbed in the process, with the bodies reburied at Candie. In 1913, a controversial cull of gravestones took place, much to the dismay of local paper The Star. By 1928, the Church handed over responsibility for the cemetery to the Town Constables, as no burials had occurred there for fifty years. In 1933, Spencer Carey Curtis painstakingly transcribed the inscriptions of the remaining 500 or so gravestones. The eastern side of the cemetery was eventually cleared and leveled, with only one notable stone remaining: the grave of "Big Sam" McDonald, whose tombstone was regularly maintained and still stands as a lasting tribute. The other gravestones were stacked against the western wall, a silent reminder of a long-forgotten chapter in St Peter Port’s history.