Discovering England's Burial Spaces (DEBS)

Discovering England's Burial Spaces (DEBS) is a Historic England funded project based at the University of York, working with community groups to develop new tools for burial space research and dissemination. The project has designed and tested new resources that will help community groups record burial spaces like churchyards and cemeteries. It has also created a pilot national database for burial space research, so that groups can safeguard their research in perpetuity and share findings with other researchers. The Burial Space Research Database enables groups conducting research into burial spaces to share their findings and publish results. It also encourages groups to use standardised recording methodologies and vocabularies, meaning that datasets from different surveys are interoperable, allowing connections and comparisons to be made within and between research projects.