Book on isolated graves earns pair research award
The authors of a book that provides information about scattered burial sites across the Central Okanagan have been recognized for their research efforts.
Bob Hayes and Susan Campbell’s book, Isolated Burials, won second place last week in a competition sponsored by the B.C. Genealogical Society.
Written over a period of five years, Isolated Burials refers to dozens of graves located outside cemeteries in the Central Okanagan.
For their research, Hayes and Campbell visited the graves and referenced many Canadian, American and European sources to compile some biographical information about people buried in the plots.
Photographs and documents obtained from private family collections, and from public archives, enhance the stories chronicled in the book.
“For a long time, it was pretty common for people just to be buried on the land they owned, rather than in one of the few cemeteries that existed,” Hayes said in an interview on Oct. 30, 2014.
Including the one on isolated graves, Hayes has written 16 books on cemeteries and gravesites around the Central Okanagan.
Explaining his interest in the project, Hayes said: “I just think everyone deserves to have something recorded about their lives. These people might not have been among the movers and shakers, but they were part of community life in the Central Okanagan.”
One small cemetery near Duck Lake in Lake Country includes the oldest known grave in the Central Okanagan. It contains the remains of Edward Postill, who died in 1872.
Another isolated grave, the highest one in the Kelowna area, is far above Westside Road, at an elevation of 579 metres above Okanagan Lake.
Buried there is Rev. Philip Stocks, an Oxford-educated minister who came to the Okanagan at the outbreak of the First World War to be near his children. He died on his mountaintop property on July 31, 1916, and was laid to rest there. His tombstone says “Lord Remember Me.”