Local cemetery sleuth

By Adelle Ellis, Times Reporter

Spending free time hanging out in a cemetery may sound unappealing. But for one local woman cataloguing local cemeteries, it is the perfect way to relax, work on a project and ultimately help others with their genealogy research.
CanadaGenWeb’s Cemetery Project is a free online catalogue offering searchable listings for over 18,000 known Canadian cemeteries.
The project started in 2004 as a volunteer project that branched out from CanadaGenWeb, a website database established in 1996 with information about Canada and its provinces and territories. The original website was started in order to collect and distribute genealogical data on the internet and host information such as biographies, births, marriages and deaths of people, one-room schools, land records, newspapers, war memorials, censuses and much more.
“The project started in 2004; it is to help people doing genealogy research… there are many volunteer positions that the cemetery project can use,” said Jennifer Young, librarian at Crowther Memorial Junior High School and a cemetery sleuth.
Young heard about the project years before she started volunteering with it. Since 2016, she has catalogued two cemeteries: Fern Cemetery in Storthoaks, Sask. and the Strathmore Cemetery.
“Strathmore took me two summers; there were over 1,000 headstones,” said Young who photographs the cemetery and headstones, writes down any information to index the cemeteries and sends it into the CanadaGenWeb cemetery database where the website does the rest and puts the information together.
Since learning about and working on the project, Young has been asked to do several different presentations on how to photograph and index a cemetery to get more people interested in the project.
Young presented at the Alberta Association of Library Technicians (AALT) conference in Drumheller last May and in her hometown of Gainsborough Sask. this past summer. This past October, Young presented at the Strathmore Municipal Library, which filmed and uploaded the presentation to YouTube.
“Jennifer (was) here to talk about this project and how you can get involved to become your own cemetery sleuth. It’s strictly volunteer. Right now, it’s pictures and the information that’s on the tombstones and the plots, and then it gives you a little bit of research on the cemetery itself,” said Carmen Erison, assistant director of library services with the Strathmore Municipal Library.
Young plans on working on indexing another cemetery next summer.
“I will probably do another one next summer but I haven’t decided which one… I hope more people in the area do the cemeteries around here. They wouldn’t take long and they need (to be) done,” said Young.
To learn more or to volunteer with CanadaGenWeb’s Cemetery Project, go to their website (cemetery.canadagenweb.org).