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 in 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.
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As more people have become involved in genealogy, and as increasing numbers of records have been digitized, there has arisen a need for research support: research hits a dead end, it is too far to get to a research location, the difficulty of the assignment requires assistance, and people just run out of time. The GANS Research Queries team was organized to solve these problems. GANS is now offering a full range of research services to provide support, both "Look-up Services" and "Consulting Services", and a description of each is provided below.
We look forward to assisting you with your query as quickly as possible. However, due to the change in Canadian citizenship legislation, we are currently experiencing much greater volumes of queries than normal. It may take us up to thirty (30) days to respond. Your email is in our queue and will be responded to in the order received.
If your query related to Nova Scotia birth or baptism records, please note:
In Nova Scotia, birth registrations began in 1864 and stopped in 1877. From 1877 to October 1908, the government did not record births. There are a limited number of delayed birth registrations after this time. You can search for a birth record at the Nova Scotia Archives vital statistics website, using the following link: archives.novascotia.ca/vital-statistics. If you do not find a birth record, it is unlikely it was recorded by the government.
Outside of the time periods when the government was collecting birth registrations, churches were recording baptisms. The Nova Scotia Archives hold microfilm for some Nova Scotia churches - over 500 of them. However, there are other church records that were burned in fired, lost when the churches closed, or the records were simply not provided to Nova Scotia Archives for microfilming and retention.
If you would like us to search for a baptism record, please provide us with your ancestor's name, parents' names (if known), date of birth, place of birth, and religion. We can then determine if there is a possibility of finding it.
Please do not send any money until we can determine if there is a record for your ancestor's church.
Queries will be addressed in the order received. They are handled by knowledgeablel and enthusiastic volunteers, but time constraints can occur. While we endeavour to finalize queries as quickly as possiblel, please allow for the possibility of 4-6 weeks for completion.
At the time you make payment, please send an email indicating the amount you are paying, and for which product to queries@novascotiaancestors.ca. If you are a member, you have to login to your membership first in order to receive member pricing for these services.
