Leonard's dowsing reveals cemetery details
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When I last wrote of Tillsonburg’s Pioneer Graveyard, we did not have a final count of graves that had been dowsed by Mae Leonard. She completed the dowsing and mid October I gave a public tour of the graveyard before removing all the colour flags, which marked the original sections. During the tour some of the participants were able to give information on family members they thought were buried there as well as recalling where the really tall monuments were located three-quarters of a century ago.
So, what exactly did we get out of this? Well, as each section was completed more of the roadways needed to get horses and carriages around the cemetery became visible. Several large empty areas were puzzling until we realized that parking areas were required and horses and carriages take up more space than a car.
The individual graves are smaller than today’s are and much closer together. Why? When this graveyard opened in 1838 there were very few families living here. Money was scarce, trade and bartering were what you did. People did not have funerals as we do today. The deceased lay in their beds or on tables for viewing, as log cabins didn’t have parlours. There was not even a church in our wee village back then. Coffins were not always used, a simple shroud was what most could afford. Legs could be bent to keep the size of the coffin or shroud used as small as possible.
No one had the money to purchase several plots in advance of a death either, especially when you consider that families back then had 10 children and many people did not know if they would be staying here or moving on for better deals in other settlements. When someone died, they went into the next grave in the row.
Back then Cholera, diphtheria, typhus, consumption (TB), measles, infections and many other diseases killed, sometimes wiping out whole communities. The rows were filled up very quickly. When dowsing the graves Mae could tell when an epidemic ravaged the village. The graves were smaller and tighter together. We have one row with 19 children. Some graveyards buried the children separately, but we don’t know if that was done here.
Originally the graveyard extended north, at least halfway across Simcoe St. Mae felt that George and Nancy Tillson and family graves were in the northwest corner, where the road is today. It was the highest point of land and over looked George’s town and valley. One hundred years later, in 1938 graves had to be moved for Simcoe St expansion.
These included some Tillson Graves. In 1985, Mary Ellen Maybe, daughter of Lyman Oatman, recalled that E.D. and Mary Ann Tillson had to be moved, however we believe that to be an error, as they were buried in the new cemetery which E.D. opened in 1881. This was most likely George and Nancy. Evidently the family would not witness the move so long time-employee and friend Lyman witnessed the exhumation and reburial.
At this time we suspect that the tombstones were move back to what today is the northwest section of the graveyard, where Mae dowsed out a group of Tillson graves with a few Van Normans graves near by. I would suspect that the space they were moved to was, originally, a parking spot for that end of the graveyard.
By the 1960s the Tillson and VanNorman stones and monuments were picked up and re-erected and fenced in the northeast corner. By then no one knew where any of the graves were and the founders plot was erected on top of about 50 graves.
In total the area removed for road expansion probably held several hundred more graves. Some were moved with in this cemetery and others moved to the new cemetery.
During the dowsing it was noticed that the closer we got to the northwest corner the bigger the graves became, perhaps it was prestigious or simply that by the 1860s and 70s there was more money to spend are larger graves. We have a section in which 12 black people were buried, a few 1812 veterans, one brick-lined crypt and one suspected small potters’ field. All of these are part of the 1,652 graves Mae dowsed.
We have most of the names on the 110 pieces of tombstones left, but we are searching for another 1,500 or so names of people, who are in our Pioneer Graveyard. Jane Smith, Marg Hollister and Greg Tinguely are now microfilming to get the name in every obituary in the Tillsonburg newspapers from when the papers stared in 1863 until the cemetery closed in 1881. Ernie Turner is searching the earlier Ingersoll papers trying to find more names as well.
But we need you to help, by doing what Janice Chmarney did. When researching her family history, she discovered her great grandfather Coutts and a daughter died between 1838 and 1881; she contacted me.
So PLEASE, if your family has ‘been here forever’, contact me (519-842-9416) and we fill try to find out if they lived and died in that time period. Over the winter, we would like to get as many of the graveyards original residents listed on our Welcoming/Index Stone.