Getting the graves straight

MIRIAM HILL

IQALUIT — Christopher Fraser and Paddy Long park their bikes on the dirt path weaving through Iqaluit’s waterfront cemetery.

They blow on their hands to keep warm and scan the crosses and flowers visible in the mist.

Fraser, 13, and Long, 15, are spending their summer figuring out who’s buried where in the cemetery.

The project, funded by the city, is needed so that people aren’t buried on top of each other, Long says.

And, Fraser adds, it will allow people to discover where their relatives are buried and visit them.

“They can go to the town office or anywhere and say, ‘Yeah, I’m looking for so-and-so and I’d like to know where he is, I forgot.’ They can say, ‘Yeah he’s in lot 223 or whatever,’” he says.

Long spent his first week on the job scouring burial records and birth certificates going back to 1947. Then he set to work building a database of all the names of people buried — or possibly buried — at the cemetery, and mapping their burial plots.

“Very likely, based on the numbers we’ve got, there’s not any space left, or very little space left, in the present cemetery.”
– Cheri Kemp-Kinnear,
Iqaluit’s Community Economic Development Officer

Iqaluit’s community economic development officer, Cheri Kemp-Kinnear, says the idea for the project came from the city council’s Niksiit committee. Part of its purpose is to determine if Iqaluit needs a new cemetery.

There are 482 people known to be buried in Iqaluit’s cemetery. The city has paperwork on another 500 people who may be buried there, but no one knows for sure if they are.

“Apparently, burial permits were issued here for people that were buried in other communities, because this was the main administrative location for that to be done,” Kemp-Kinnear says.

The burial permits and death certificates don’t make it clear where the people are buried, she says.

In search of more information, the students contacted officials with both the Catholic and Anglican churches, but even they had few records.

The next step in the cemetery project, Kemp-Kinnear says, is to take the updated database and map to a community meeting and collect more information from residents about who is buried where.

“The information we’ve collected will have to go back to the Niksiit committee for them to decide what they want to do with respect to new grave sites,” she says.

“Very likely, based on the numbers we’ve got, there’s not any space left, or very little space left, in the present cemetery.”

Fraser says he learned a lot from the project. He hopes better records will be kept so someone else doesn’t have to do the same research 10 years from now.

Neither student felt uncomfortable in the cemetery, although Fraser says he tried not to find out too much about the people he was researching.

The most common causes of death were stillbirth and drowning, Long says.
Fraser says many of the death certificates said “unknown name,” meaning a child was born dead or died shortly after birth.

“I tried not to let any feeling get in the way. It’s just something I have to do and I should do it before I think too much about it. Like, if I wanted to know about that person or something, I could go back after I finished the work,” Fraser says.