ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies a number of possible directions for academic research, clustering around the three areas of demographic, family and social structure; the production and expression of identity and changing beliefs about the living and the dead. It considers the burial places and memorial monuments of the later post-medieval period in Britain. There are hundreds of thousands of burial grounds belonging to the post-medieval period in Britain, but at present they constitute an under-exploited resource. Most people who participate in graveyard research are primarily interested in the monuments and graveyards themselves. Gravestones can be a good source of information for quantitative demographic study of mortality rates, fertility, and so on in the 19th century, but only where it is recognised that the commemorated population does not represent the total living population. Gross demographic trends, like the population of a parish, are better approached through documentary sources than by monuments which commemorate a changing and locally variable proportion of the population.
