A long-lost gravesite of 15 orphans has been discovered in a sunken cemetery in Bradford.
The children, aged between three and 18, lived at a former Barnados’ children’s home in Manningham between 1898 and 1911.
The orphanage, then known as Dr Barnardo’s Home for Little Incurables, supported youngsters with terminal or life-altering illnesses.
Yet the care home’s graveyard in Undercliffe Cemetery has been lost for more than a century after the orphans were relocated to another site.
Volunteers spent five years rummaging through 12,5000 burial records to find a headstone emarked ‘Dr Baranado’, referring to the charity’s founder.
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Many of the youngsters who called the facility home were orphans or from low-income families.
Some suffered from rickets, a disease in which bones soften and become deformed, or the now preventable and curable disease, tuberculosis.
Irene Lofthouse, a volunteer and trustee at Undercliffe Cemetery Charity, said: ‘It was a revelation to find out that Bradford had been a location for “Dr Barnardo’s Home for Little Incurables” and we and our research volunteers were excited by the discovery.
‘As the database record gives the grave number, groundwork volunteers were then able to locate it and assess what needed to be done to restore it, enabling the Cemetery to commemorate both Barnardo’s work and the children buried there.
‘Each time we uncover a record and a grave, it adds and acknowledges not only to Bradford’s history, but also national achievements – of which Barnardo’s is a part.’
Lofthouse and other volunteers are working to restore the graves, which had sunk several feet below the ground.
Nadine Good, north regional director for Barnardo’s, said the volunteers are ‘honouring the memories of these children’.
Names of the children and when they died
Arthur Westwood, age six – June 16, 1899
James Alfred Elton, age 15 – February 15, 1900
Samuel Martin Minns, age 15 – August 23, 1900
Joseph Frederick Sunley, age 16 – August 27, 1900
Arthur Ayling, age 11 – January 22, 1901
Robert James Denny, age 14 – March 1, 1901
George Francis Brown, age three – August 26, 1902
Horace Russell Everett, age 16 – October 17, 1902
Thomas Michael Varley, age 17 – July 24, 1903
Walter Aleck Percy Goddard, age nine – July 27, 1903
Esther (Kate) Mason, age 14 – September 18, 1903
George Hague, age 12 – December 18, 1903
Richard Saunders, age 13 – April 28, 1904
Florence Edith Jane Pegler, age 18 – December 31, 1904
Benjamin Lestrille, age 11 – September 3, 1906
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