The Cemetery and Cultural Memory: Montreal, 1860–1900

Abstract

The common conception that the cemetery is a site of memory for all who died and were buried before us is a false one. There were certain biases in who was being commemorated, a form of selectivity to the memorial process that caused a great number of people to be eroded from the landscape. The argument is based on observations from a sample of seventeen hundred individuals from the latter half of the nineteenth century in Montreal. A selection of twelve surnames from archival data includes the three main cultures present in Montreal in the nineteenth century (French Canadians, Irish Catholics and English Protestants) and allows me to reconstitute families, to identify their kinship ties and to determine their situation in life. Records from the cemeteries on Mount Royal confirm the burial of individuals from the sample. The presence or absence of these individuals in the cemetery landscapes depends on different commemorative practices influenced by religion, culture, gender, status, age and cemetery regulations.Il est faux de croire que le cimetière conserve la mémoire de toutes les personnes disparues et ensevelies. Dans le processus funéraire, il existait des critères de sélection qui ont exclu plusieurs personnes des commémorations. Pour le démontrer, nous avons élaboré un échantillon de 1 700 individus de la deuxième moitié du XIXe siècle. Les douze patronymes retenus des archives consultées représentent les trois principaux groupes culturels vivant alors à Montréal : Canadiens français, catholiques irlandais et protestants anglophones. Cet échantillonnage a permis de reconstituer les familles, de déterminer les liens de parenté et de préciser le statut social des individus. Les registres des cimetières du Mont-Royal permettent de confirmer si les sépultures des personnes sélectionnées s’y trouvent. Le dernier élément dépend des pratiques de commémoration motivées par la religion, la culture, le sexe, le statut, l’âge et les règlements du cimetière

Inscribing Ethnicity: A Preliminary Analysis of Gaelic Headstone Inscriptions in Eastern Nova Scotia and Cape Breton

“…Historian Frances Swyripa has followed a similar interpretive trajectory, concluding that among Ukrainian settlers in Canada, burial places doubled as symbolic spaces for localised ethno-religious identity (2003,2010). Recent post-graduate theses (Martin 1999;Watkins 1999;Cook 2011;Gallén 2012;Guibord 2013;Jasinski 2013;and Shirley 2016), the research mandate of the Holy Cross Historical Trust in Halifax, and the ongoing investigations of this article's authors into the death customs of Nova Scotia's Gaels testify to an accelerating interest in Canada in exploring ethnic consciousness via the cemetery.…”

An Ethical, Cultural and Historical Background for Cemetery-Based Human Skeletal Reference Collections

“…Grave turnover and secondary interments were still common in Protestant countries in the early modern period (Holmes 1896;Musgrave 1997;Curvers 2010;Kenzler 2015), and grave reuse has continued in some central and northern European countries, such as the Netherlands (Heessels and Venbrux 2009), Norway (Kerner 2018) and Switzerland (Lopreno 2006). Other examples include the eighteenth-century Assistens cemetery of Copenhagen, Denmark (Anthony 2016), as well as the nineteenth-century Catholic cemetery in Montreal (Watkins 2002), reflecting French culture in Canada. However, in much of the Protestant world such practices have died out, particularly in Western Anglophone countries (Goody and Poppi 1994;Mytum 2003Mytum , 2009Sayer 2011;Raeburn 2012;Boyle 2015;Gade 2015).…”