Cemetery Documentation
- Cemetery Transcription Guidelines – a Do and Do Not list (Heritage NL)
- Handbook for Recording Inscriptions in Cemeteries (NL Genealogical Society)
- Cemetery Survey Form (NL Genealogical Society)
- Marker Recorder Form (NL Genealogical Society)
- Municipal Designation of Cemeteries in NL (Heritage NL)
- The Provincial Archaeology Office (PAO) and Abandoned Cemeteries (Government of NL PAO)
- Ground Penetrating Radar Considerations for Archaeological Sites (Maria Lear, Department of Archaeology, Memorial University)
Examples of NL Cemetery Databases
- St. Francis of Assisi Roman Catholic Cemetery, Logy Bay-Middle Cove-Outer Cove
- St. Paul’s Anglican Church Cemetery, Trinity, Trinity Bay
- Blank cemetery database spreadsheet template (free to copy, email dale@heritagenl.ca for help setting it up)
Conservation and Repair of Grave Markers
Note: Do No Harm! Before you start any work on historic markers or tombstones, contact dale@heritagenl.ca to go over your plan for conservation. Do not add substances such as flour, face powder, bleach, chalk, chemical cleaners, shaving cream, etc, to markers – you should always prefer a non-invasive method to interact with gravestones. A powerful flashlight or mirror is your best bet for reading difficult inscriptions.
- Preservation (Association for Gravestone Studies)
- Landscape of Memories – A Guide for Conserving Historic Cemeteries (Government of Ontario) (Note: this guide was published 2003 – some of the methods here may be out of date, so do your homework before you start any repairs!)
Historic Newfoundland and Labrador Burial Sites and Cemeteries
- Provincial Archaeology Office Annual Review 2022 – Old Blackhead Methodist/United Church Cemetery
- Occasional Paper #07 – Chinese Graves at the General Protestant Cemetery, St. John’s (Heritage NL)
- An Early European Burial Ground at Bloody Point, New Perlican (Shannon Lewis-Simpson)
- Exploring God’s Acre: The Moravian Church Mission Graveyard, Hebron Labrador (by Dale Jarvis in The Newfoundland Ancestor)
- Fieldnotes Series #01 – A History of St. Mark’s Anglican Cemetery, New Perlican (Heritage NL)
- ‘Here lieth interr’d’: an examination of 17th-century British burial landscapes in eastern North America (Robyn S. Lacy, Masters Thesis)
- A nursery for seamen: life histories from the St. John’s Royal Naval Hospital Cemetery, Newfoundland (Tricia Jessica Anne Munkittrick, Masters Thesis)
- Patterns in the Methodist Cemetery at Freshwater, C.B. (by Margaret E. FitzPatrick in The Newfoundland Quarterly)
- The place of burial: spatial focus of contact of the living with the dead in eastern areas of the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland (Gerald L. Pocius, Masters Thesis)
- The Saddle Island cemetery: a study of whalers at a sixteenth-century Basque whaling station in Red Bay, Labrador (Lori M. White, Masters Thesis)
- The Transformation of the Traditional Newfoundland Cemetery: Institutionalizing the Secular Dead (by Gerald L. Pocius in Material Culture Review)
- Transnational Identities of Early 20th-Century Chinese Immigrants: A Study of Chinese Graves in the General Protestant Cemetery in St. John’s, Newfoundland (by Xingpei Li in Material Culture Review)
Material Culture: Headstones, Memorials, Carvers
- Décryptage d’une pierre tombale à Harbour Main (Le Gaboteur)
- Tomber sur le patrimoine d’outre-tombe (Le Gaboteur)
- A Permanent Place in Newfoundland: Seventeenth-Century Basque Tombstones in Placentia (by Miren Egana Goya in Newfoundland and Labrador Studies)
- Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Newfoundland Gravestones: Self-Sufficiency, Economic Specialization, and the Creation of Artifacts (by Gerald L. Pocius in Material Culture Review)
- Funerals: Did you know? (Decks Awash)
- A Survey of White Bronze Mortuary Monuments in St. John’s (by Dale Jarvis and Kelly Drover in The Newfoundland Ancestor)
- List of grave marker and memorial carvers for NL (Heritage NL)
- Master Stonecutter Bernard Miller (Decks Awash)
- Frederick George Chislett (Wikipedia)
- When Death is a Family Tradition: Barry Skinner- Genealogist, A Legend in His Own Time and Space (by Lara Maynard in Culture & Tradition)
Funerary Architecture
- Occasional Paper #04 – Lych-gates in Newfoundland (Heritage NL)
- The Moravian Dead Houses of Labrador (by Dale Jarvis in Communal Societies)
Podcasts and Interviews
- Cemetery Tales with Dale Jarvis (Podcast by Bojan Furst)
- The General Protestant Cemetery with Suzanne Sexty (Living Heritage Podcast)
- Headstones, Hexfoils, and Historic Archaeology with Robyn Lacy (Living Heritage Podcast)
- Using the BillionGraves app to document local cemeteries (Living Heritage Podcast)