Group offers reward for old graveyard info
SYDNEY — A local historical group is posing a grave challenge.
The Cape Breton Genealogy and Historical Association is offering $50 to anyone who leads them to any cemetery in the Cape Breton Regional Municipality not yet listed in the organization’s extensive database.
Association president Norman Macdonald said there are huge gaps in Nova Scotia’s official birth and death records. Often, old headstones are all that remain of a person’s life and legacy.
“In some cases, the graveyard information — the birth and the death date — are the only records that exist for those people. And many headstones have a way of disappearing,” Macdonald said.
“I don't think these people should be lost to time.”
The association has 363 graveyards listed on its website (www.cbgen.org), which contains the names and GPS coordinates of each site, as well as photographs of the headstones.
“We've spent probably 15 years looking for cemeteries. We go in and we photograph them, we create an alphabetical file, and we put them on our website. If you search for John Macdonald, for instance, when you find the John Macdonald you're looking for, you'll click on his highlighted name and the picture of the headstone will pop up for you.”
Macdonald said while he’s confident the Cape Breton Genealogy and Historical Association has documented almost every existing graveyard, the group occasionally finds new ones.
'THEY SOON DISAPPEAR'
“I don't think there's very many. A number of years ago we got a copy of the provincial government's list of graveyards and we had more on our list than they did,” he said.
“We found one, for instance through a member from Ontario. How he knew where it was, I don’t know, but he knew where it was. It was somewhere in the Fourchu area. He dragged us about a mile and a half in the woods to find this old, old graveyard with three broken headstones in it. And we photographed them and we were delighted to do it because not too many people are going to find that graveyard again. And those stones, if they should fall over and the leaves fall on them, they soon disappear.
“There's a graveyard in Glace Bay for instance that’s so overgrown by trees that most people don't know it exists.”
Meanwhile, Macdonald said traffic on the Cape Breton Genealogy and Historical Association’s website has tripled since the COVID19 pandemic outbreak.
Previously they averaged 600 daily visits but recently there are more than 3,500. He added that more than half of the online members are from the United States.
“People can’t get out and they’re looking for something to do,” he said.