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A crucial task in cemetery restoration is to secure the boundary walls of the site, and we have recently made a number of grants for work of this kind. At the Agra Cantonment Cemetery, for example, where every existing grave has been painstakingly recorded, money has been allocated in a phased programme to restore and heighten the cemetery walls - See conservation page on left for photos.
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 Jhansi cemetery gatehouse
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At Jhansi where the cemetery was in a desolate condition, a BACSA grant was put towards restoring the little Gothic gatehouse. Once that was done, a start was made on clearing the undergrowth around the tombs themselves.
BACSA has a number of other current projects, concerned with the equally important task of recording the cemeteries and those that lie within them (See Transcriptions page on the left for an example). An ongoing concern is to ensure that visitors abroad can actually locate the cemeteries where their ancestors are buried. Most travellers have had the frustrating experience of not being able to find a particular cemetery, and even more frustratingly, not being able to convey to locals what they are looking for. So the forthcoming BACSA Guide to Cemeteries will not list the tombs within a certain cemetery, as our Cemetery Records Books do, but will show the traveller how to get to that cemetery, with the help of a sketch map.
Over the last thirty years, BACSA has published, or reprinted, forty-two Cemetery Records books, more than one a year. (We also publish BACSA BOOKS on South Asian topics, written by our members.) Next year sees a new edition of ‘The Burma Register of European Deaths and Burials’, first published more than twenty years ago. As genealogical interest increases, so more information comes to light, which can be incorporated into updated Registers.
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Jhansi Cantonment Cemetery