Unearthing history

Alma Mabee and Nancy Woods cross reference church records with a cemetery headstone.

Searching for the pieces of our past in a churchyard

The Friends of Macaulay Heritage Park have come up with a unique way to get in touch with our local history. They want folks to volunteer to Adopt-a-Plot in the St. Mary Magdalene Churchyard in Picton.

The historical cemetery has been falling into disrepair. Grave markers have been broken and the grounds themselves were becoming overrun. History was literally becoming buried leading to the loss of information about who was buried, there and when.

The new project is under the guidance of Nancy Woods of Friends of Macaulay Heritage Park. Woods became concerned by the lack of historical church records; too few and sparse to clearly indicate who has been interred in the cemetery, when and where.

There are bits of information and clues that lead to meticulous research both within historical documents and just below the ground in bits and pieces of stone.

Wayne McNulty searches for artifacts and clues among the rocks, grass and dirt at the St. Mary Magdalene Churchyard.

Last week a small group of volunteer amateur geologists and historians gathered at the park’s graveyard to try and piece together an accurate picture of the cemetery’s history.

They quickly got to work, dividing the yard, probing the ground with rods, taking inventory of the location of graves and, cross-referencing to a location index map done in 1977.

By day’s end the group had decided to take two courses of action: To look into getting a scan of the grounds, both to see if they missed anything and to preserve the integrity of the churchyard, and to redo the site map.

Woods hopes other interested individuals and organizations will come forward with information about the historic landmark, and take or ‘adopt’ a family’s or individuals name to try and get a more accurate history of these ancestors, and to help maintain their gravesites and, by doing so, fill in some of the missing pieces of our story.