Lost burials: How many are there?

Lost burials: How many are there?

Finding the grave marker of an ancestor is always a great moment. These stones are as close as we can get to our distant forebears. Once found, the monument may even include previously unknown information, although their significance goes well beyond practical research considerations.

Despite this, it is common for cemeteries to be poorly cared for. In the north, winter freezes, and then spring thaws the ground, and stones easily topple and become submerged. In North America, the written historical period starts at various times in specific places, depending on settlement by writing cultures. And even then, there was often no economic possibility of memorializing the dead when the living were hard pressed to survive, or did not yet have access to stones and stone carvers. All communities have unmarked burials, even from the recent past, as well as entire lost burying grounds waiting to be rediscovered under fields, parking lots, and woodlots.

I was curious about how many burial locations in my areas of interest are unaccounted for. How many grave locations could still be recovered after a bit of research and analysis?

How many gravestones could be hiding under the turf or forest floor?

Fortunately, Statistics Canada (StatsCan) has population information for the province of Ontario going back to the 1820s. Crucial tables provide population totals by county for some of the 1820s and the 1830s.

I used these tables to identify that the population of Prince Edward County, Ontario, Canada (PEC) in 1824 was 8132 people. The population increased between 2% and 6% per year (with one decline of 2% in 1829) up to 1839. I used a conservative 2% average growth rate to reverse-engineer that the population of the county was about 5000 people in 1800 (perhaps 4500 in 1795), although this estimate may need to be adjusted to account for the actual arrival dates of various pioneer settlers in the 1790-1810 period. 

The next question is what is a reasonable estimate of mortality (the deaths per year) for the county community? Modern mortality in the province of Ontario is 7.4 people per thousand (0.74%) but these were hard times in a frontier community and the era in question also included one war, at least one cholera outbreak, and a rebellion. 

One estimate of mortality in the non-urban U.S. colonial communities many of these early county residents came from, is 20-25 people per thousand (or 2.25% on average) and this seems a much more likely scenario for what was happening in PEC. Adding up the yearly mortality under the modern rate gives an optimistic estimated mortality of only 2500 deaths in the 1795-1839 period. Doing the same with the more realistic 2.25% rate yields an estimate of almost 8000. 

Knowing these mortality figures, I was curious about the number of surviving and documented gravestones for people who died in PEC between 1795 (the earliest death date on a surviving stone) and 1839. Based on my experience researching the area, it did not seem likely thousands of graves dating to this early period are still standing and recorded.

Fortunately, there is a website, cemsearch.ca, which includes data collected from transcriptions of area cemeteries. These transcriptions were prepared by volunteers reviewing visible stones starting in the 1960s. Before the Internet, such transcriptions were published primarily by the Ontario Genealogical Society. Cemsearch is set up to enable partial string searching on death year, so I was able to pull out all the PEC records for people who died from the 1790s to the 1830s.

Once I completed that process, I had identified 306 known burials. Therefore, the survival rate for marked graves in the early period is no more than 10%, and much more likely to be a meagre 4%. 

At least 95% of burials in this period, in this county, are lost.

While identifying 2200-7500 lost graves may seem a gargantuan task, I do not think it would be impossible...

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This kind of analysis is not possible without the contributions of many others. Especially CemSearch Project Leader and Coordinator, Ron Smith, and the CemSearch data entry volunteers. And, all the monument transcriptions prepared over the last half-century by: Susan Bergeron, Stan Broadbridge, Lily Corson, Hugh Heal, Peter Johnson, Lori King, Mrs E. Lindsay, Carmen Montgomery, Josephine O'Coin, Stan Terry, Amy Vader, C. Loral R. Wanamaker, Mildred Parliament Wanamaker, and Ray Waterhouse.