Kineton and District Local History Group embarked on a big project in early 2010.

With the popularity of TV programmes such as Who Do You Think You Are, more and more frequently the group was being asked if it could assist people who come to Kineton searching for the graves of their forebears. Unbelievably we could trace no plan of St Peter’s churchyard to help them, and often they went home disappointed.

So, over a period of two years or so, we mapped St. Peter’s churchyard, and we recorded the inscriptions, and photographed every stone before further deterioration occurred, and have presented the results to as wide a public as we can – through this website, and by booklets available to look at in the church and in the Warwickshire Record Office. The ‘new’ extension to the churchyard, which was started in the 1940s, was also  surveyed in early 2012 and the results are being slowly added to the database.

There are over 500 graves in the churchyard, not to mention those in the churchyard extension, and the work has involved members of the History Group, augmented by interested members of the village.

 

The project won the Gold Award for History and Heritage section of the Warwickshire Rural Community Council competition in 2010, which gave us all great encouragement to continue, and the databases have been augmented by a transcription of the Kineton burial registers from 1737 to (almost) the present day.

We are now pleased that people can at last find the graves of their relatives when they come to seek out their roots in Kineton, and those living far away can see pictures of their memorials.