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 and earthiness 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 may break 500,000 persons in 2024, but the population is overwhelmingly concentrated in the Halifax-Dartmouth urban area.
We have 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. We have begun an effort to develop a "story map" to hold these cemetery locations, saying something about the communities in which they are embedded.
But we need to go beyond that to do work with the stones themselves. GANS currently holds records on almost 100 of those cemeteries, with about 32,000 cemetery stone images, only some of which are accessible on our website. None of our cemetery stones, though, have GPS co-ordinates.
The Board has committed funds to conduct a pilot project in plotting stone locations for three cemeteries at "sub-foot" accuracy. The three cemetery locations are Prospect, Elderbank and Spry Bay, where we will obtain GPS coordinates and photographs for each of the stones, and plot the data on a map.
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.
