"It was just kind of nice to find a sense of belonging," she said. Mass rural-to-urban migration has depopulated much of Nova Scotia's countryside, reducing some communities to ghost towns and leaving the departed without nearby descendants to maintain their final resting places.īut as genealogy has emerged as a popular online pastime, many of Abandoned Cemeteries of Nova Scotia's roughly 6,300 members are looking to reclaim these ancestral ties.Īshley Conrad of Cole Harbour joined the group in hopes of learning more about her family history, and was surprised to discover that some of her forebears were buried in a wooded plot she'd driven past hundreds of times.Ĭonrad followed a secluded path to Lawlors Point Cemetery to pay her respects to Clara Maud Giles, her first cousin four times removed.
Some tombstones date back to the 18th century, and many have shattered or sunk into the soil as the coffins beneath them rotted and collapsed. The graveyards tend to be tucked away in tangled woods, on precarious hilltops or along the edges of untended fields, he said. In the past year, Abandoned Cemeteries of Nova Scotia has charted nearly 100 burial sites scattered across the province, from the far reaches of Cape Breton to Skafte's stomping grounds in Annapolis Valley, which has so many plots he refers to it as "the dead centre."Ī cemetery is considered "abandoned" if it doesn't receive regular maintenance, but the overgrowth on many sites is so impenetrable that Skafte presumes they haven't been touched in decades.
"We'll make sure that if somebody comes along years later, and they're all in worse state than I even found them, they'll never be lost again." "It's like a first step to make sure it doesn't disappear," said Skafte, a writer and photographer based in Bridgetown. In that sense, he said, the project's mission is to resurrect these crumbling monuments to Nova Scotia's history. The gone and forgotten die twice, said Skafte - once in life, then again in memory.
He cut through the thicket of pine trees, swept aside the blanket of deadfall and brushed off the moss shrouding the rickety cairn.Īfter clearing the area for future visitors, Skafte posted photos and GPS co-ordinates of the graves to Abandoned Cemeteries of Nova Scotia, a Facebook group devoted to chronicling orphaned burial grounds. The only mark of "Baby's" time on Earth is a tombstone with a rabbit engraving, slowly being swallowed by the wilds of Nova Scotia over more than a century.Įven that may have been lost had Steve Skafte not scoured the unruly fields of Plympton, Digby County, to find the Hardscratch burial ground guarded behind a rusty gate.
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