LISTING OF KNOWN BURIALS

The list below contains all the Families for which we have an existing gravestone, or for which we have an obituary.  Click on any family name, and you will see as few as one burial listing, or over 30, depending upon the name.

We know that there are possibly another 200-300 individuals buried in the cemetery, and we'll get more names posted when they are available.  So why aren't there more gravestones?  Erosion over time is the answer.  Early tombstones were made of sandstone or wood, and few remain.  Some sandstone tombstones remain, but all wooden crosses would have disappeared after a couple decades.  

List of Burials - New and Old Cemetery

Update, February 20, 2020 - the Excel file has been posted to the Honouring Our Ancestors Facebook group.

Thanks to many hours of work by Kelly Stephen, we can now make available, to those who are interested, a complete listing of all burials in the Pioneer Cemetery, and in the New Cemetery, for the early 20th century. 

In the Pioneer Cemetery, there are over 600 burials listed, which seems reasonable since the cemetery was in operation for about 100 years, and since the area once was once more densely populated than is currently the case. 

 

The list of burials far outweighs the number of tombstones that remain in the cemetery, and there are a few explanations that we believe account for this difference:

Many of the burials probably used wooden crosses to mark the graves, and these have long since deteriorated.  If you were to visit the Souris Cemetery, you would see that in the present era, wooden crosses are still used.

Sandstone tombstones deteriorate easily over time, and most of the early stones have disappeared.  The few sandstone tombstones in the cemetery can therefore be considered as very rare.

Slate and other stone tombstones deteriorate and crack over time.  The reason that so many are currently in the cemetery owes to the restoration efforts of our mason, who was able recontract many tombstones from broken fragments

If you are interested in receiving a copy of the burials, please email the administrator at admin @ peipioneercemetery.com  (please note that spaces were added here, so as to prevent spammers from retrieving this email address, so remove them as you email the admin).