10 most deadly Great Lakes maritime disasters: Identifying the lost...

... and collecting stories of survival (updated)

Recently, I read of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum's success in finding lost wrecks. An article explained the museum is seeking contact with descendants of those who perished. However, no listing of names was provided and there is no cemetery for these shipwrecks on FindAGrave, so the society is relying on the local news piece to get the word out to people who already know about their connection to the wreck. While they might connect with some people in the area, realistically, most of those directly linked to these hundred-year old tragedies are living further away. A significant portion of descendants won't even know their ancestors were involved.

There are over six thousand known shipwrecks on the Great Lakes, starting with the Griffon of 1697. The most famous is the Edmund Fitzgerald which sank with twenty-nine crew in 1975 and was immortalized by Gordon Lightfoot the following year. Over the decades, I've discovered several people  I could not trace in vital registrations appeared in newspaper searches, having drowned in the lakes or nearby waters. Anyone researching family in the provinces and states surrounding the lakes is probably going to find a maritime tragedy somewhere on their tree.

Here are the ten most deadly Great Lakes shipwrecks and following the list, some observations on what can be done to commemorate these tragedies and connect people to their stories:

1. SS Eastland, 844 passengers and four crew lost on 24 July 1915

Not always considered a Great Lakes shipwreck as this disaster occurred while the ship was docked in the mouth of the Chicago river. Nevertheless it was chartered to travel across Lake Michigan to Michigan City, Indiana, for a corporate picnic and, without question, constitutes the largest loss of life in any maritime disaster associated with the Great Lakes. About as many passengers died on the Eastland as the RMS Titanic (the later also losing almost seven hundred crew). In a cruel twist of fate, the ship rolled when lifeboats were added in the wake of the Titanic disaster and the extra weight exacerbated its top-heavy design. User DM47 has done excellent work to create a virtual cemetery on FindAGrave of over 800 who lost their lives. (See Wikipedia)

2. PS Lady Elgin, about 300 lives lost on 8 September 1860

A sidewheel palace steamship rammed by a schooner in Lake Michigan, this maritime disaster led to rules requiring running lights. The passenger manifest was lost with the ship, but Elgin is considered the greatest loss of life on open water, in a single-ship disaster, on the lakes. There are a couple of people attempting to compile virtual cemeteries for this disaster on FindAGrave. (See Wikipedia) 

3. SS G.P. Griffith, at least 241, and perhaps 289, lives lost on 17 June 1850

Carrying over three-hundred people, mostly immigrants from England, Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia, in the early morning a fire started in the smoke stacks and was fanned by the momentum of the ship as the captain attempted to reach shore. Unfortunately, she struck a sandbar and the ensuing panic as the fire progressed caused many to drown in the attempt to get to land. Not a woman or child was saved except for the wife of the ship's barber. The ship's records were destroyed in the fire and only about twenty-five dead could be identified at the time. The recovered unidentified were buried in a mass grave on the beach near Willowick, Ohio, which has since been reclaimed by Lake Erie. The wrecksite.eu website has identified 123 people who were aboard, including the twenty-five known deceased. (See also Wikipedia)

4. SS Phoenix, 190-247 lives lost on 21 November 1847

Carrying mostly Dutch immigrants, Phoenix departed Buffalo for Chicago with about 275 passengers and 25 crew, and shortly afterwards the captain fell, injuring a knee. The first mate took over command of the ship in bad weather. A fireman reported boiler pumps were not working properly but his concerns were ignored by the adjusted chain of command. In the early morning hours a fire started in the engine room and it quickly spread out of control. With only two lifeboats, a near-maximum capacity of thirty-nine people were evacuated, rowing five miles to shore. Exhausted, the boats could not return in time to rescue more, and as the ship burned, people died from the fire or from hypothermia in the frigid November water. Rescue ships moved towards the fire but only arrived in time to find three survivors. Wisconsin Maritime Museum reportedly has a 1693 Dutch Bible which washed ashore shortly after the disaster. The ship owners claimed no more than 190 died but the ship's clerk put the number closer to 250. (See Wikipedia)

5. SS Noronic, at least 119 lives lost on 17 September 1949 

The SS Noronic was a 600-passenger cruise ship unfortunately fated for yet another Great Lakes dockside disaster. This time it happened in Toronto harbor on Lake Ontario, where the Noronic burst into flames in the early morning while passengers slept and much of the crew was off the ship visiting friends and relatives in the city. Most died from smoke inhalation, burning, falling, or crushing injuries as they tried to escape the ship while only four people actually drowned after jumping overboard in desperation. This disaster saw the first use of forensic dentistry to identify victims. It also marked the end of the cruise ship industry on the lakes for more than seventy years. (See Wikipedia)

Inspired by DM47's work creating a virtual cemetery for the Eastland, and considering this year is the 75th anniversary of the disaster, I created a virtual cemetery for SS Noronic on FindAGrave. (Given the excellent day-specific search available on Ancestry, running a search for everyone who died on 17 September 1949 (exact to year) in Toronto was not difficult, and all but 16 already had a memorial on FindAGrave).

6. HMS Ontario, approximately 80 people lost on 31 October 1780

Built in 1780 on Carleton Island in the St. Lawrence, she sank in a storm while underway from Fort Niagara to Oswego in Lake Ontario. "Approximately 80 men perished with the ship, comprising an estimated 31 sailors (two of whom were officers), three members of the Royal Artillery (one being an officer), three privates and one officer of the 8th (King's) Regiment of Foot, 30 men of the 34th (Cumberland) Regiment of Foot (one being an officer, two serjeants, one corporal, one drummer and 30 privates), two rangers, one passenger and four Native Americans" (Wikipedia). The fully-intact and well-preserved wreck was discovered in 2008 and is the oldest wreck in the lakes found to date.

7. PS Alpena, 60-80 people lost on 15 October 1880

Unfortunately, after a promising start to the voyage, the Alpena sailed into the “worst gale in Lake Michigan recorded history,” a storm also known to history as "The Big Blow." Carrying passengers and cargo, it went down with the loss of everyone aboard and a debris field stretching twenty miles. The main wreck has not been located. The only passenger list was aboard the vessel. (See Wikipedia and michiganshipwrecks.org where enthusiasts and descendants are actively investigating who was aboard.)

8. Niagara, more than 60 lost on September 23, 1856

Niagara, another palace steamer, caught fire and sank in Lake Michigan in 1856, taking the lives of more than sixty, including a former congressman. However, nearby boats were able to effect a rescue of many aboard and it is likely many families have stories of surviving this disaster. No online commemoration appears to exist. (See Wikipedia) 

9. Northern Indiana, 56 lives lost on 17 July 1856  

Transiting Lake Erie from Buffalo to Toledo, she caught fire mid-morning while under the charge of the first mate. Many were able to survive by jumping into the summer waters and waiting for rescue ships. The passenger list was lost with the boat but bodies were recovered from the lake for several weeks (unlike the cold deep of Lake Superior, shallow Lake Erie usually gives up its dead). Northern Indiana is the shipwreck on this list with the least amount of online content and commemoration.

10. SS Algoma, 48 lives lost on 7 November 1885 

The worst loss of life on Lake Superior, Algoma was designed to accommodate 240 first class passengers and 500 in steerage and was built in 1883 for the Canadian Pacific Railway Company to run between Thunder Bay on Lake Superior and Owen Sound on Lake Huron. Built in Glasgow, it was too big to go through the Welland Canal in Niagara and had to be cut in two, sent through the canal on pontoons and then reassembled in Buffalo. By some miracle, when it departed Owen Sound on November 5th a year later, only 37 passengers were aboard, the fewest ever (it was late in the season and a rail route around Lake Superior had just opened). On November 7th, it ran aground in a snowstorm and pounding waves split the ship in two. The bow section drifted away and many of the passengers and crew were swept into the frigid breakwater. Three people made it to shore and eleven survived by staying in the stern section until making shore on Isle Royale the next day after the storm abated. Only two of the survivors were passengers. The wreck was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984 and I have created a work-in-progress cemetery at FindAGrave, using 2009 research posted on rootsweb by Barbara Lewellen. 

My experience with Ontario death registrations of this period is that they are unlikely to offer a complete and easy-to-access register of victims of Algoma, unlike the situation with Noronic in 1949. Additionally, some of the bodies may have been recovered on the American side. (See Wikipedia.)

Notable mention: Great Lakes Storm of 1913, loss of about 250 lives from 7-9 November 

Also known in local lore as the "Big Blow," the "Freshwater Fury," and the "White Hurricane" this storm wreaked havoc for three days and ultimately sank ships on four of the five lakes on November 9th, leading to the loss of approximately 250 lives. While there do not appear to be any FindAGrave virtual cemeteries for this event, several who lost their lives have memorials mentioning it, which come up in Google searches. Those who lost their lives were on: Isaac M. Scott, Charles S. Price, John A. McGean, Argus, Hydrus, Henry B. Smith, James Carruthers, Regina, Wexford, Leafield, Plymouth, LV-82 Buffalo. (See Wikipedia)

***

Domestic shipwrecks like these are less documented than international events accompanied by customs and immigration paperwork. In the list above, the three 20th-century events are much better recorded than those in the century before, exactly in parallel with generally improved government recordkeeping. Of the other seven, much less is currently known of the earlier events. However, it would be a mistake to assume it is impossible to reconstruct near-complete lists of the dead or identify many survivors, for two reasons:

Firstly, we now have advanced newspaper searching of huge tranches of publications around the world. Many local historical societies and maritime enthusiasts previously scoured newspapers in the vicinity of these disasters, collecting what information they could. However, enhanced global search capabilities offer more. These disasters involve travelers, and names and details of victims were often reported in local press in their home communities. Using the ship name and date of wreck, and perhaps a partial name if available, obituaries, burial notices and other content can often be found, further developing the story.

Secondly, we now have the means, via FindAGrave and online trees, to permanently record family lore about relatives involved in historical disasters. If you were told of such an ancestor -- even if you don't have good details -- add the information you know to as many online trees as you can. Eventually, you could link up with a maritime enthusiast who can use their knowledge and expertise to help you fill in the details, while you are helping them investigate and commemorate what happened. I was impressed by those working on the PS Alpena at michiganshipwrecks.org, as they are successfully doing just that.

Never ignore rare names...

... and always investigate namesakes

FindAGrave image (inset) Grave of Joanna Nald Dickson

I made a mistake recently. While working on researching and linking some FindAGrave profiles, I came across a married woman whose birth place and maiden name, once discovered on a sole surviving record, indicate she is likely my previously untraced first cousin (born 1807 and six times removed). The grandmother we share is unknown, born in the early to mid 1700s, probably somewhere in the Thirteen Colonies. Our grandmother died shortly after arrival in the Bay of Quinte in the 1780s and rests in a lost and undoubtedly unmarked grave. 

While happily adding my cousin's husband and children to the family tree, I found a daughter whose first and middle name was transcribed, possibly from a gravestone photo, as "Joanna Nald." Looking at the photo, the stone was encased in lichen and it was very difficult to make out the letters. I googled "Nald," and put it in the surname search field on FamilySearch. The nominal number of returned hits seemed to indicate it wasn't really a name. I changed Joanna's name on the tree to "Joanna Maud" making a note to the effect that "Maud" seemed a more reasonable read of what was visible.

Fortunately, I continued adding her siblings from census and other records and within minutes hit a baptism record for her older brother, with an original scan where his first and middle name was clearly recorded as "John Nald." Going back to Joanna, I corrected my mistaken middle name and got to work hunting down the Nalds.

Given that "Joanna" is a much rarer name than John, I entered "Joanna Nald" into all the usual genealogy sites and after scrolling through some useless results, managed to hone in on the only really relevant hit, a Mrs. Joanna Nald who lived in New York State in the early to mid-1800s. The location was a little off, as my first cousin was part of an Ontario family, but explainable, given NY borders Ontario. Joanna seemed to have a mother-in-law born in New Jersey and there were signs Nald might be a truncated-in-America version of a colonial Dutch name like Van der Nald.

The dates were also interesting, as NY Joanna Nald was one generation older than my first cousin's daughter and therefore, fit as a potential namesake. Joanna's death year was in the NY index and with that year, 1855, I Googled and found a brief death notice listing her as the widow of John Nald. With both a Joanna and a John lined up, I knew I was on to something important. 

I hoped the "Nald" name might reflect relationships from my cousin's side of the tree (particularly her father's, which would be directly relevant to my own ancestry) but knew there was a fifty-fifty chance it reflected a namesake on her husband's side (if it was a relation at all). He had a very common name, John Dickson, and all that was known about him from Canadian records was that he was born in the U.S. at the turn of the 19th century. Without any information about his relations, such people in Ontario are usually extremely difficult to trace

From directories, censuses, and the death notice, it was clear Joanna had at least a little property (which would also explain why a younger generation was named in the Nalds' honour). I looked for a NY Will and discovered Joanna died intestate and the papers were scanned and available online through FamilySearch. And they contained a crucial nugget of information.

It was Joanna's mother, Elizabeth Raynor, who was made executor of the estate, in conjunction with Raynor R. Smith (who had to be Raynor Rock Smith). Furtling about on FindAGrave and FamilySearch I tracked down all the Elizabeth Raynors of the right age living in Hempstead, Long Island, NY in the 1850s.There was only one that really fit and crucially, she was the second wife of Benjamin Raynor and the daughter of Archelaus Doxsee, who I recognized. He migrated from NY to the same township in Ontario as my cousin around 1800.

Now, NY Joanna Nald was born about 1801 and Elizabeth Doxsee did not marry Benjamin Raynor until 1821, and they reportedly had no children. Joanna was not born a Raynor. Elizabeth was forty-one at this marriage and so it is reasonable to assume she had at least one earlier marriage, but the name of this first husband and Joanna's surname was in no way documented. 

Looking at Raynor Rock Smith, the second executor of Joanna's estate, I noticed his wife was Elizabeth "Dixon" born about 1811 in New York. Hmmm. Could Elizabeth Dixon Smith be the daughter of Elizabeth Doxsee, making her husband the brother-in-law of Joanna Nald and explaining why he was appointed an executor of her estate? Could she also be the sister of the John Dickson born about 1805 in the U.S. who married my cousin and managed to name two of his children John Nald and Joanna Nald Dickson? Could both John Dickson and Elizabeth Dixon Raynor be at least half-siblings of Mrs. Joanna Nald through their shared mother Elizabeth Doxsee? 

They could. This would mean Elizabeth Doxsee married a man named Dickson, at least before 1805 when John Dickson was born, and possibly before 1801 when Joanna was born. However, if she married three times, Joanna would not necessarily be a Dixon and finding the sequence of marriage records, if they survive, would be very difficult. I did extensive searching looking for Elizabeth Doxsee's marriage to a Dickson/Dixon and found no genealogical records. 

I took a break.

A day later I dropped "Elizabeth Doxsee Dickson Hempstead NY" into Google. In the list of hits was a Long Island genealogy page on the Doxsee family and from that very long page, showing in the results was a brief transcript of "The Dickson Family Record" (probably from a bible) giving the following information: 

Elizabeth DOXSEE  

Born 12 July 1780 Merrick, Nassau County, NY

Md. 4 Feb 1800 near Merrick, Long Island, NY

John DICKSON, Sr.   

Born 2 June 1774 in Dalkeith, Scotland   

Died 4 August 1815 

Given the place is exactly right and the dates are perfect, the odds that this is the right couple are quite high. Joanna must be a Dickson given she was born no earlier than 1801 (after this marriage). John Dickson of the U.S. was probably visiting his maternal grandparent(s) and cousins when he met and married my cousin, staying in the township afterwards and naming two children after his brother-in-law and his sister. It will take further searches in specific archives, and possibly some DNA match analysis to prove, but it would be something worth doing for any interested descendants.

I hadn't solved the mystery of my direct ancestor, but I probably solved the mystery of John Dickson (father's origins Dalkeith, Scotland!) who married into our family, and, I'd traced another line descending from Archelaus Doxsee, a well-known pioneer on the Bay of Quinte frontier. A good day's work, once I discovered the mistake of my "correction" and stopped ignoring the valuable clue of a rare and unexplained name.

Golden Horseshoe Mysteries: Holiday Omnibus

 Buy both mysteries in one holiday-themed volume and save about 30% (depending on market place).

Canada  

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New Release: Book 2 in the Golden Horseshoe Mysteries

 

Mornings That Will Never Come, the follow-up to The Girl in the Library

is now available on Amazon (.ca, .com, .uk, .au, .fr and other international markets). Detective Jen Mahoney has transferred from working fraud in the city to working at the county police station with Detective Barry Lapworth. 

Winter comes early and a body is found on a frozen lake. They must drill below the icy surface of a tight-knit community to uncover the truth.

This is the second book in what will be at least a four book series set in the Golden Horseshoe region of Ontario.

Look in the right place

 Any localized place information you have is probably the best clue you will ever get.

Someone contacted me recently for help. An ancestor of his had been attached to the wrong family on the FamilySearch tree. He needed to identify the actual parents and provide proof so others would stop perpetuating the mistake. I looked at the family group and instantly understood what he was getting at: the attached parent couple was well documented living over 200 km/ 150 miles as the crow flies (and maybe twice that by the land routes of the time), from the somewhat isolated Ontario township where his own ancestor was known to be living. While both families were definitely in Ontario, another researcher, probably without much understanding of Ontario geography, assumed incorrectly that meant they were in close proximity.

Ontario is easily twice the size of most major European countries. You could basically fit both Texas and California into Ontario. While Ontario historically did not have the population density of a European country, actual physical distances still matter. In the early days, distance mattered quite a bit.

Knowing the surname and which township the actual parents must have been living in provided the key starting point to solving this problem. A digital index revealed one person with that surname who had letters left at the post office servicing the township in the 1820s. Further searches revealed there were absolutely no vital or church records existing for this person. However, given the township, that is not really surprising if he died before 1861 (generally the 1851 censuses survive in Ontario, but not for this place). The church and burial record survival for this area is known to be poor. 

Further searching identified six other people with the right surname who researchers associated with this township, potentially siblings of the target brick wall. However, two of those people were revealed to be incorrectly assigned to the township and, once their authentic locations were identified using vital and census records, a bit of further research identified their parents and actual family units. That still left four potential siblings. A noticeable commonality between these five people was their longevity. This proved to be a disadvantage because when they died in their late 80s and 90s, the grandchildren and in-laws who reported the deaths did not know the names of their parents. It was becoming clear why these people had endured as brick walls in so many trees. 

While initial searches revealed there was no handy family surname file of clippings and 19th or 20th-century research from incidental sources, such files did exist for two families the potential siblings had married into. These files, in the ever-useful Herbert Clarence Burleigh fonds at Queens University (scanned on Internet Archive), contained crucial sketched family trees and one mysterious typed manuscript genealogy. 

Both files indicated all five people under investigation were siblings, and they were indeed children of the tardy letter collector. And, crucially, their mother proved to be the daughter of a well-documented Loyalist. The extensive typed genealogy included tantalizing references to information from 17th or 18th-century Dutch bibles and phrasing indicated information collected from living descendants, although it was not clear when these activities occurred and specifically who initiated it.

Following up on a reference to one bible-owner, who had a very rare surname, further untangled the situation and revealed that the typescript was a partial copy of an article series that appeared in the New York Genealogical and Biographical Record in 1882 and 1890. The original article (accessible via Google Books and FamilySearch) revealed the NY-based author had solicited descendancy information for a notable NY Dutch family. Given the intermarriages and the author's willingness to include female descendant lines when known, this had captured two elusive brick-walled families in the isolated Ontario township and a related brick-walled family in Ohio. 

The information was only recorded because the 1880s researcher's mail campaign reached two unmarried siblings born in the 1820s who still lived on the original Ontario family farm. They responded with everything they knew and then both died in 1891.

With such treasured information in hand, I corrected the initial mistaken parentage and set about fixing other indicated mistakes on the FamilySearch tree. I always hesitate to disconnect an assigned child unless I have reasonable evidence the link is wrong and when doing so, I try to reassign the child to correct parents in order to avoid disappointing any descendants.

When I hit one such case, a person found on the tree, but not in the published genealogy, I instantly understood why the (probably erroneous) connection had been made. One of the children had been given as their first name, the somewhat unusual Dutch surname of their currently assigned grandmother. I can imagine the researcher's enthusiasm in making this connection (surely this is good circumstantial evidence!). However, in reviewing and further assembling the census records for this family it became apparent that the birthplace for the person incorrectly attached to the Ontario family was not in 1820 "Canada" as listed in the profile (although his wife was Canadian), it was, per the 1875 NY state census, Herkimer County NY.

Within five minutes of investigating the limited number of appropriately surnamed families in Herkimer in the 1820s, I found another couple, married in Herkimer in 1807 ... and the wife had the same somewhat unusual Dutch surname ultimately bequeathed to her grandson. By coincidence, two such couples existed at roughly the same time, one in Ontario and one in New York.

The researcher who made the incorrect association would have found this other couple before ever looking at the Canadian family, if they had just been looking in the right place.

Burials hold the final clues...

... but you may need to research an entire cemetery to find them all.

A few years ago, two teenagers managed to inflict at least $150,000 in damage to an ancestral burial ground I am very fond of. It is a rural garden cemetery set in a picturesque hilly landscape. When I first visited years prior, I was fortunate to see the cemetery before more recent severe weather events damaged many of the large old trees. I imagine the cemetery board had a lot of maintenance costs and headaches on their plate even before the vandals arrived.

When news began to trickle out about havoc at this peaceful place, I sat at my computer thinking: I am far away, what can I do? I had already added hundreds of memorials for the cemetery to FindAGrave (as had several others) — the majority of people buried there are probably at least my fourth cousins — but there were still many thousand memorials unlisted, including most of the 200 or so damaged monuments. I did have several datasets for the cemetery at my fingertips, as well as photos taken on previous trips, so I created profiles for the damaged stones.

Once those were in, I kept going.

It took a couple of weeks but within the month, I had ensured that everybody buried in this cemetery had at least an online memorial with their basic vital information and plot location, no matter the current condition of their marker. Given FindAGrave is indexed directly to Ancestry and FamilySearch, this will bring these burials to the attention of descendants who don't already know they are there. And, the plot location information would later prove extremely useful.

I was a bit worried about managing ten thousand FindAGrave memorials. Would it be an administrative burden? Typically only a handful of edit requests come in every few days. Mostly I was hoping that relatives would request that I transfer the memorials to them and these requests do arrive in a slow trickle. 

However, I am responsible for the thousands of memorials I seem destined to manage for some years. Basic birth and death year information is good but is not enough to tell a story. The narrative of community and family that our cemeteries preserve is only revealed when relationships between people and the places they have known, as well as historical events, are made clear. At the beginning, I figured doing comprehensive research on an average of three people a day would cover everyone buried in this graveyard in ten years. They would have a stable, internet-permanent, memorial of their lives and connections that no misbehaving adolescent could destroy. While I haven't checked my progress very thoroughly, I am about half way through this project and it has yielded some interesting benefits.

With the plot data in, the ability to quickly identify groups of people buried in the same plots and then research those connections using the standard databases really increased the authority, quality and completeness of the memorial profiles I could produce. Proximity of burials to each other, in the absence of other documentation, provides very strong inferential evidence. 

To some extent this is also true for people buried within the cemetery as a whole, and I often link up networks of twenty or thirty people within the cemetery once I start working on the one or two memorials that have new edit requests. Unmarried people, apparent 'strays' to the community and people with very common names have all been correctly identified and biographied once their presence in the family plot revealed the crucial evidence about who they actually were. 

I prioritize which memorials to work on based on edit requests I receive and photo requests for the cemetery as a whole, and this is a nice unsystematic system that rarely feels like a burden. I don't have an obligatory list of things to do on a fixed timeline and typically only login when I have some time to spare and boredom to cure, and in each case it seems like I am helping someone crack a mystery.

Burial proximity can also provide the logical evidence needed to exclude inaccurate relationships. A few edit requests did not add up because it was clear the persons involved could not have been, say, married, given that the person I managed was buried next to their spouse (as identified on the gravestone or by the burial register) and the date arrangements didn't work. Often, I could use local knowledge to point the other researcher to the correct burial elsewhere and thereby untangled incorrect death registration attributions (which can easily happen for Ontario records during the period when parents and spouses were not listed and many cousins with similar names and dates lived in this community).

I have some brick walls associated with families in this cemetery and I suppose in the back of my mind I am hoping one day I will research a family and some fact will arise and there will be the ah-hah! moment where it all slots together. Some of the thousands of edits I've done generated those breakthroughs for other people. For me, it hasn't happened yet, but there are tantalizing little clusters of people with rare-seeming naming patterns and similar origin locations.

I won't know for sure if the breakthrough evidence is there until I've researched the whole thing.

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...

***

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.