Halifax County Cemetery Project
Cemetery information - including headstones and burial records - is a valuable part of genealogical research. The gravesites are more than that too, as the final place where our ancestors are buried. There is a rawness about cemeteries that is both beautiful and terrible.
GANS has begun a project that is focusing on the Halifax County cemeteries. Halifax is the capital of Nova Scotia, and the political and economic centre of a county area of some 1.35 million acres. The population of the county broke 500,000 persons in 2024, but the population is overwhelmingly concentrated in the Halifax-Dartmouth urban area.
We compiled an initial list of 241 cemeteries located in the county, with an unknown number of stones, some with a few dozen, others with several thousand. After we applied more rigorous property mapping to these cemeteries, we ended up with 182 cemeteries that we have been able to rigourously define and detail. The cemeteries which fall into the difference between the two counts will require considerable work to assess and bring into play. However, based on the well-defined "population" of cemeteries, we have developed a county map to hold these cemetery locations, and can say something about the communities in which they are embedded.
Between the fall of 2024 and the fall of 2025, we conducted and completed work on three cemetries in order to build a prototype: St. Andrew's Cemetery at Elderbank in the Musquodoboit Valley, and St. Anthony's Roman Catholic Cemetery and St. Margaret's Anglican Cemetery on Sober Island. We transcribed the existing stones, took photographs, and developed survey locations for each stone. These have been mapped in ArcGIS, and we are developing an application to connect the geo-spatial information to the datasets in our new "Data Module".
Developing this prototype is a preliminary to converting the existing cemetery records which GANS holds for about 100 of these cemetries - with about 32,000 cemetery stone images - into what we have been developing as a modern search and display system.
We are grateful for the volunteers who are doing this work and helping us preserve these details for future generations. If you have ancestors who lived, or were buried, in these locations and have stories you could share, please make contact with us at our email address.
