How I Became Interested in Cemeteries

I have long been interested in cemeteries and fascinated by grave markers. This interest grew and was nurtured by the manner in which I grew up interacting with graveyards. Visits to these sacred parcels of ground for me when I was a child always meant -- not that someone had died -- but that it was picnic time! More specifically, it was when the Anglican Parish of my community opened the historic Holy Trinity Anglican Church for a Sunday service and afternoon pot-luck picnic.

There was also two 'games' that were played between my siblings and I during long road trips. The less frequent one, was holding one's breath when passing by a cemetery which is occasionally very hard to do when the cemetery in question fills an entire city block and the vehicle you're in is stopped at a stoplight at one of the corners of said cemetery! I don't think we every quite succeeded with that one. But the most frequent 'game' happened on the long road trips in which my siblings and I would keep out our eyes for horses and when seeing them, claim and count them for ourselves. We would also keep our eyes peeled for cemeteries because the person who spotted it would yell out "Bury all your horses!"--and take the lead with the highest count of horses while everyone else had to start counting all over again.

My passion and appreciation continued to grow with the occasional visit to various cemeteries while vacationing in the province of Ontario primarily in the company of my mother hunting down unique grave markers, interesting names, unusual epitaphs, looking at dates and calculating math. (To be honest, my mother calculated the math and I was just suitably impressed with a person's age or saddened that they had died so young.)

As I grew older I grew interested in photographing my local cemeteries and have decided that 2009 is as good a year as any to start my ambitious project. To begin of course I needed to learn just how many cemeteries there are in the Rural Municipality of Shellbrook No. 493. So like any child that has grown up digitally, the first source of information that I sought was the Internet.

Entering the search parameters "cemeteries + rm of shellbrook," the first hit was for the CanadaGenWeb Cemetery Project (CGWCP) website with five cemeteries being registered in the CGWCP database. I knew automatically that that was not a correct total as two cemeteries that I pass daily on my way to work were not mentioned though a third one that I knew of was.

However CGWCP lead me to the Saskatchewan Genealogical Society (SGS) when I duh! -- my mother is a member of the local chapter! Ask her! -- Mom did not know the answer, but the SGS website does host a cemetery index which listed fourteen cemeteries for the R.M. of Shellbrook and with that list is the all important land location data.

So, next source of information was my father and his profusion of maps. Surprisingly Dad could not find his map for Shellbrook, just Canwood, Buckland and other neighbouring R.M.'s. But my questions were not a loss as Dad began to instruct me on how to actually decipher the Saskatchewan method of land location.

While waiting to get the R.M. of Shellbrook map I visited the local library, Shellbrook Public Library, and pulled from the shelf all the history books related to the various R.M. districts to see what I could learn from them about the history of any mentioned cemeteries and the unlikely discovery of a cemetery not mentioned in the SGS cemetery index or marked on the R.M. map.

And this is where I learned something interesting. The SGS index references cemeteries by the community district they are associated with while the history books reference cemeteries by their church affiliation or given name. So what the SGS index labels "Holbein - Sturgeon Valley" I have always called "Holy Trinity Anglican Church and Cemetery."

I was disappointed to learn that of the fourteen catalogued by the SGS, only nine are mentioned in the history books compiled by the local people and of those nine, only three were mentioned because of their religious affiliation and did not have individual entries. But I'll include the book exerts and other information for those mentioned cemeteries when I start posting about them.

Later Dad purchased a new R.M. map and we spent time one evening going over it. We got sidetracked however because though the map has a helpful little red cross in eleven spots that mark according to the legend "cemetery/church" -- in that order -- we knew that it was not entirely accurate as the legend also had a symbol representing community halls. Three of which we knew of were not indicated on the map and further pursuing of the map reveled that some of the residences were not located in the correct locations either. So the R.M. map is useful, and I intend on learning fully how to decipher land locations, but unfortunately the map is not entirely dependable.

So it will be interesting to discover in time just how many cemeteries there are in the R.M. of Shellbrook No. 493.