A MEMORIAL headstone over a grave should either include the Christian names of all the children and grandchildren of the deceased, or none of them, a Chancellor has ruled. To include only a selection of the names of the bereaved family was not permitted.

The Consistory Court of the diocese of Sheffield imposed that condition when granting a private petition for a faculty permitting the installation of a headstone in the churchyard of St Mary’s, Catcliffe, commemorating the petitioner’s paternal grandfather and grandmother, who had died in May 2021 and October 2022 respectively, and had been interred in the same plot.

Memorials and the wording on them should not be used as an arena for ongoing family disputes, the court ruled.

The Chancellor, the Worshipful Judge Sarah Singleton KC, said that churchyards and the memorials installed in them should be places for the bereaved to “visit and remember those whom they had lost at the place where their remains had been interred”, and “should also be an oasis of peace, suitable for time spent in quiet reflection and contemplation for all visitors whether bereaved or not”.

The petition to the Consistory Court was brought after the incumbent had refused permission because the proposed memorial did not comply with the diocesan churchyard rules, in that it was shaped as a book of polished black granite. The proposal also included a coloured poppy design and was crowded with engraved sentiments.

The names and dates of death were set out on the pages of the book. The memorial included on its base slab, at either side, flower vases, which were to include more sentiments on each side with the Christian names of two family members on the left side, and the Christian names of the petitioner and her father on the right side.

When public notice of the petition was displayed at the site of the grave, three family members, a daughter and two other grandchildren of the deceased couple, objected because of the naming of some, but not all, of the deceased’s children and grandchildren.

One objector said that the headstone, which was “to mark the resting place of two very special people in our lives . . . should not be a point of contention between families”.

In addition to the petition itself, the petitioner had written detailed letters to the Registry about events and family dynamics particularly during the last years of the lives of the deceased. She also relied on the fact that she and the other named relatives were paying for the memorial without any contribution from the objectors.

The Chancellor said that “it would be a wholly destructive and quite unnecessary exercise incompatible with the overriding objectives” of the faculty jurisdiction for the court to “resolve the predictable and inevitable conflict of factual account” between family members, including the objectors and the petitioner.

The lack of contribution towards the cost of the memorial was “no doubt woven into the family dispute”, the Chancellor said, and she was not “inclined to come to evidenced conclusions about them”. The fact that someone was paying for a memorial, however, did not mean that their proposals must be followed. The overarching objective for churchyards to serve the needs of all their visitors as sites of quiet reflection and remembrance outweighed any such consideration.

In regard to the headstone, the Chancellor said that she would prefer it “if the wording engraved on churchyard memorials were grammatical and tasteful”.

The word “passed”, which had been used on the proposed memorial instead of “died”, or “passed away”, was not “attractive or, in a linguistic sense, appropriate”. Also, the words “reunited again” were a tautology, and the petitioner was urged to reconsider and use “reunited” or “united again”.

Overall, the Chancellor found the memorial overcrowded with sentiments and would wish for a more minimalist design. Those aspects of the memorial, however, could be left to the bereaved and the incumbent to navigate together in the context of the overarching objective for churchyards.

The memorial in the shape of a book was permitted, subject to the condition that the Christian names of all the children and grandchildren of the deceased were included, or that no names of the bereaved family were included. The inclusion of the names of a selection of the bereaved was not permitted.

The poppy design to be engraved was to be limited to an outline in the same colour as the rest of the engravings, either gold or white. It must not be in colour.

The Chancellor remarked that some coloured engravings were “creeping into some churchyards” and “should not be permitted”.

Owing to the nature of the family dispute involved, the petitioner and other family members were not named by the Chancellor.