We have a rough idea, but we do not know for certain how many people are buried in the cemetery.
We know from the burial registers of St Mary’s Church that there are a total of 9,096 entries. With the Dissenter registers we can add a further 4,558 individuals. So there are at least 13,654 recorded burials.
St Mary’s church kept a register of stillborn infants buried in the cemetery between 1871 and 1914. This has 393 entries, which takes the total to 14,047. However, there will certainly have been still born burials prior to 1871, and likely more after 1914 that were not recorded. Incidentally, conversations with former gravediggers suggests that stillborns were often tucked below any new burial taking place in the cemetery at the time. The stillborn register does not indicate any grave locations.
We have more uncertainly on top of this. There seem to have been a handful of further burials in more years which were not recorded in the registers. There are also an unknown further number of deposited cremations. These sometimes appear in the registers, but not always.
We also know that when the cemetery was opened in the 1850s, and the older Dissenting burial grounds around the town were closed, many (but not all) burials in those grounds were dug up and transferred to new family vaults here. These early re-burials are not recorded in the burial registers, we only know of them from some inscriptions on some memorials, and a couple of newspaper reports. This report from the Bridgwater Mercury 31 August 1904 regarding the Unitarian burial ground in Friarn Street: “the ground was closed about the year 1850, and that by an order of the Secretary of State many of the bodies were subsequently exhumed, and at dead of night removed and re-interred in the cemetery which had been newly opened on the Wembdon Road.”
So, ultimately there are at least 14,047 recorded burials. Saying ‘around 15,000’ in total would be a safe assumption.
