PLACE AN ORDER
Thousands of people every day make their way across the pavement in the middle of Sydney. Town Hall Square would be one of the busiest places in Australia, with people bustling about doing their daily business. What most of those people probably don’t realise, is that they are walking across the site of the Old Sydney Burial Ground, which operated as a cemetery from 1792 until 1820.
Over 2200 individuals were buried there, most without any headstones. Many names have been gathered by some pretty thorough research and are divided into those who were definitely buried there, and those who might have been. Those who might have been buried there are people who died in the timeframe in which the cemetery was operating, but for whom the historical records are too vague to provide certainty. There don’t seem to be any denominational divisions in the cemetery, in fact, the cemetery was never actually consecrated. There do, however, appear to have been some social divisions – which, given the nature of Sydney’s population at the time, is not surprising.
If you are looking for someone who was in the early military in the colony, and died in Sydney, some members of the 46th, 48th and 73rd regiments were buried in the Old Sydney Burial Ground.
The good news for those of us interested in NSW genealogy is that the names of the people buried (or thought to have been buried) there are freely available on the internet. Just go to http://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/learn/history/people-and-places/old-sydney-burial-ground . You will find a very interesting history of the burial ground and, right at the end, the opportunity to download two documents. The first is the list of names of the individuals interred, or thought to have been interred, in the burial ground. The second document, a Word document, is a complete list of the references for further information about the burials.
Not all the dead people are still under there. After the Colonial Government granted the site to the City of Sydney in 1869 to build the Sydney Town Hall, the graves under the footprint of the proposed building were moved. They were reinterred in the Church of England section of Rookwood Cemetery. Later building works uncovered more graves at various times throughout the 20th century. Even as recently as 2003 and 2007, previously unknown grave sites have been discovered.
So next time you stroll across the paving outside the Sydney Town Hall, or rush out of Town Hall station on your next shopping trip to the City, spare a thought for the city’s early pioneers who once were buried there.
