Except translation, this story has not been edited by achinews staff and is published from a syndicated feed.
A dedicated group of volunteers make up the Alberta Family History Society (AFHS) and they travel from Edmonton to the far south of the province to record names and dates on grave markers.
“We’ve been doing this since the 1970s and it started in the days before digital cameras,” said Wendy Schultz, AFHS cemeteries project team leader. “We’d go out with clipboards and our pens and write down what was on all the markers in a cemetery, and maybe try to find out what plot number it was and that’s what we had.”
Today the group uses digital cameras to take pictures of all the markers. Those pictures are then analyzed and recorded on a spreadsheet.
“We’re serious about trying to get our facts right,” Schultz said. “We will look at a whole cemetery as a whole, especially the rural cemeteries and try to find out everything we can about the people who are buried there.”
Schultz says it can be a challenge to find all the hidden cemeteries in rural areas, and in some cases the volunteers have very little knowledge of grave markers.
“It’s a great thrill if we see someone who could be marked with an unknown last name and first name and not even a date or something like that,” he said. “That’s all there is on this marker in the cemetery and if we can find out who that person is and bring their story to life, that’s incredibly rewarding.”
Family history
That data is put on the group’s dedicated website (albertaancestors.ca) and can be accessed for free by anyone looking for more information about their family history. Jim Benedict is the AFHS webmaster and says that over 250,000 individuals are covered in the database.
“And that’s across about 250 cemeteries in Alberta, it’s very comprehensive and yet it’s still growing,” he said. “That includes rural communities, small villages, it can be private cemeteries, it can be church cemeteries, our team has investigated them all and we have documented it all.”
In some cases Benedict says it is possible to add more information to more famous people who are buried in Calgary such as Colonel McLeod and many more.
“It’s a great resource for people checking families,” he said. “People who love family history, looking for their relatives, maybe looking for surnames, I’m also a member of a surname society, and can connect the dots with people who have family history, on descent and in the front, they need all that background information to enrich and complete their whole family research.”
Hidden cemeteries
John Casson is a retired geologist who has volunteered with AFHS for more than two years. He enjoys discovering and photographing hidden cemeteries in remote rural areas.
“A lot of the areas are Ukrainian or they’re Eastern European, that kind of thing, there’s (also) Scottish areas, everything under the sun is because it reflects Alberta immigration (patterns),” he said. “We find these places, get a GPS location and then take photos in many cases no one even knows where they are because I have to use aerial photos to locate” these places.”
Heather Williams is a long-time volunteer who has lost count of the number of names and dates she has recorded over the years.
“I have a passion for cemeteries, I have a passion for genealogy and family historians,” he said. “You come into contact with those people, individuals, couples who are inscribed on the grave markers.”
Williams says she enjoys wandering through some of the city’s older cemeteries to read the epitaphs that date back to the 1800s. Many markers were made from sandstone which was abundant in the region in Calgary’s early days.
“Unfortunately, the sandstone did not suffer from our climatic conditions, a very porous product,” he said. “Very soon they eroded until you couldn’t even read who was actually there, without searching records through the cemetery offices.”
Schultz says some of the better known names they’ve come across are John Ware and Sam Livingston but it’s always nice to discover others who played a part in the state’s history.
“We just uploaded Courtney Brown from Waterton National Park this week, his name was actually John Brown and he was the first park ranger for Waterton Lakes National Park,” he said.
“He was quite a colorful character,” he added, “(and) did many interesting things in his time, (and) has a wonderful little cemetery for him and his two wives, right on the shores of Waterton Lakes, (with) white picket fence, lake and mountains in the background — (it’s) a beautiful scene.”
Learn more about AFHS here.
(Except translation, this story has not been edited by achinews staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
source link https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/alberta-family-histories-society-cataloging-people-interred-in-urban-and-rural-cemeteries-1.6934941
