Canton Burials: NBI
You may like to know that the National Burial Index (published by the Federation of Family History Societies) can now be seen at www.findmypast.com (used to be 1837online.com). This is a fee-paying site, but units can be purchased quite reasonably - I always seem to have plenty in reserve, by the way, for anyone wanting a quick search. It has been rather overshadowed by www.ancestry.co.uk but has excellent BMD index search and certificate-ordering facilities and is steadily adding many unusual sources.
I have the NBI in its beautifully produced CD format and it is a basic working tool for genealogy - 13 million names in the second edition. What, I wondered, could the online version add, especially as, intriguingly, it contains (only!) 10 million names.
When I compared the two versions for Canton (and variants) I found that several counties are not represented in the online version. A major omission is that London burials are missing, but these are available elsewhere, on a diferent fee-paying site. For a useful summary see
http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/genuki/MDX/ChurchRecords.html#Burials
I did, however, find about fifteen ‘new’ Cantons, added more recently to NBI. Some of these are early (17th century) and in unexpected places - they may represent lines which have died out, possibly with different origins from those which have survived. It’s impossible to pass judgement without seeing the original parish registers and I would observe that ‘Canton’ is very often misread in documents - perhaps a topic for another blog.
Among other new Canton entries are two offspring of Edwin James Canton (Line PM/P). Their deaths are registered as Pontardawe Registration District, a large area to search, but the burials took place at St John, Clydach, Glamorgan, which narrows the search and provides a new churchyard to explore!
These last are from Glamorgan FHS project work, which has covered a huge amount of ground and is shared generously. Key Canton areas such as Pembrokeshire are not covered at all in the published NBI. On the other hand, when I thought about it, I have many Canton burials for that county - fewer for other non-NBI areas - in my own records. I will look into publishing my list online.