King’s Family Grave
The following information relates to how the grave plot of the King Family was discovered. If you are unfamiliar with their story and background, please click on the Family tab of this website to learn more of their history.
For those who are familiar with the website, this page supplements what you already know about the family background of the kings and brings their story right up to the present day.
How was the Grave of the King’s discovered?
During a conversation with my dad back in December 2022, he related to me an experience. He told me that as a small child he remembered seeing an old lady sleeping in a bed in the front room of 147 New Lodge Road. This old lady was his great grandmother Catherine (Teresa) King, who was born in 1861.
He later remembered the hearse taking Catherine from the front room to the graveyard and how he and his aunt Margaret King wanted to follow, but they were too young to do so.
This piece of information turned out to be very valuable, because I had no records of Catherine’s death or of her place of burial. However, I now had a timeframe starting from 1946, which I calculated based on the approximate age of my dad, who was born in 1944, and had remembered Catherine as a little boy.
So, I reasoned, could he at the age of two, in the year 1946, remember his great grandmother, it was possible!
Therefore using 1946 as the starting year and combing through the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. I started to search all death records in the Belfast and Greater Belfast Areas. Nothing was discovered for 1946 and nothing was discovered for 1947.
However, for the year 1948 there was a Teresa King who died, on the 31st August 1948. When I opened the record, it revealed that her death took place at 147 New Lodge Road and the record also revealed that her son Owen King was present at her death. This was the official death record of the Great Grandmother of Bernard, Clare, David, Tony, Damien, Margaret, Catherine, Frankie and Pat Saunders and also of the Kings in England and America.
Incidentally, Bernard Saunders was therefore four years old at the time of her death and today is the only surviving member of both the Saunders and King Families who has a living memory of Catherine (Teresa) King.
So, with this information it allowed me to narrow down the search for her grave. You see, the historical death records in Belfast cemeteries are still written on the original paper at the time of a persons death. Thankfully these paper records have been digitalised and connected to the PRONI Online Database. However the PRONI database does not geo-locate the graves of the deceased. This means if you don’t have the exact day and year of a person’s death, then the clerk at cemetery offices must ream through hundreds of pages with thousands of names.
In most cases, they just don’t want to look for the needle in the haystack for you. However if you have the exact day and year of death and also the name of the deceased, then the search process for the clerk is easier. I had the name and with the conversation with my dad of his experience as a little boy, Now I had the day and year of Teresa’s Death and I guessed the best place to start searching would be Milltown Cemetery, which is mostly a Catholic Graveyard. I picked up the phone gave the details to the clerk, and within 30 minutes she had rang back to say that Catherine (Teresa) King’s grave had been located on Plot WD-37-B
The clerk also mentioned that the plot contained the remains of four other family members, but she did not have their names because they would be separately recorded during the specific year of their deaths. It was however intriguing. Who else was buried with Teresa?
After more than four years researching the history , the life, and activities of family members who had lived over 170 years ago, it was quite an experience to actually discover their grave. Here they where..! buried a few meters beneath my feet.
Sadly, the grave had fallen into a state of disrepair as you can see from the photograph below.
On May 13th 2023 some of the great grandchildern of Michael and Catherine King, refurbished the grave and gravestone. The names were repainted, the head stone was cleaned and the ground was resurfaced.
Also in the picture below there is Ronan Mc Caughey. Ronan is the great great Nephew of Catherine and Michael King His great grandmother was Margaret O'Hagan the sister of Catherine King. He is the third Cousin of the Saunders and Kings today living in Ireland/England and America
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1890-1954
