Saskatchewan Cemeteries

Canada Saskatchewan  Cemetery

There are many listings of the cemetery records of Saskatchewan compiled by the Saskatchewan Genealogical Society published in its magazine Bulletin. Most of these listings are indexed.

Online Cemetery Websites
There are over 3,430 cemeteries in Saskatchewan. Many groups and organisations are working on transcriptions, photographs and video recording of these cemeteries.

Many cemetery records are available online. Consider the following websites:


 * Databases The SGS Burial index searcahable online
 * Cyndis List - Cemeteries &amp; funeral homes
 * Findagrave.com Find a grave
 * BillionGraves Google map of each cemetery, headstone photos, and transcriptions. Warman Cemetery, Warman
 * Saskatchewan Gen Web Cemeteries
 * Canada Gen Web Saskatchewan Cemetery Project
 * Saskatchewan Cemeteries Project
 * Ancestor Recognition Project Cemetery transcriptions and photos
 * Doukhobor Cemetery Index
 * Germans from Russia Heritage Society
 * St Joseph's Colony
 * Search online by city, town or rural municipality name for additional online cemetery transcriptions.

Types of cemetery records
Types of care for Human Burial: earth burial, cremation, sea burial, entombment, donation to science, and cryogenic. Several types of cemetery records are available. Rural public cemeteries are under the infrastructure administration of the rural municipality, and urban public cemeteries by the local civic government (city hall). Caretakers or cemetery maintainence committees are usually appointed by the municipal government. Churches maintain church yards, and private land owners maintain homesteader burial sites. The municipal government may have kept internment records of the names and dates of those buried and maps of the burial plots in public cemeteries. Some churches have kept burial records that may give birth, marriage and other family or health details.

Tombstones or gravestones may also exist, or the information on them may have been transcribed. In Saskatchewan many local organisations are working at photographing, video taping and transcribing the cemeteries. Cemetery burial records, sometimes called internment records, often include birth, marriage, and death information. These records along with symbols on a gravestone may provide clues about military service, religion, or membership in an organization, such as a lodge. These records are especially helpful for identifying children who died young or women who were not recorded in family or government documents. Visit the cemetery in person to see if other relatives are in the same or adjoining plots.

To find tombstone or cemetery records you need to determine where an individual was buried. The person may have been buried in a community, church, private, military, or family cemetery, usually near the place where he lived or died or where other family members were buried. You can find clues to burial places in local history books, census records, funeral notices, obituaries, church records, funeral home records, death records, scrip and homestead land records.


 * Saskatchewan Biographies in local history books often provide excellent clues as to the locality which people resided in.


 * Land and Property Records are online for Saskatchewan in terms of both scrip for First Nations and Metis persons and Dominion land patent records and applications for homesteaders. Where a person lived and farmed is often a clue to locate the cemetery near this locality.
 * Saskatchewan Census records have been transcribed online for the early part of the twentith century and are searchable online also providing a clue to residence and therefore also a clue to loate the cemetery near this locality.

Types of Cemeteries

 * Churchor religious denomination


 * Government: town, rural municipality, provincial and national


 * Military: There are overseas cemeteries and memorials, for soldiers who died during service to their country. There are graves overseas of soldiers who died serving in World War I. SVWM Saskatchewan Virtual War Memorial honours those from Saskatchewan serving in the armed forces who have fallen in military service.


 * Family or private: homestead burials.

Sources for cemetery records

 * The present sexton, funeral home, rural municipality or city municipal government may have the burial registers and the records of the burial plots.


 * The Saskatchewan Genealogy Society, and its branches may have the records or can help you locate obscure family plots or relocated cemeteries. Similarly local library, historical society, or local historian may assist in locating burial sites.


 * Sextons' records and transcripts of tombstone information that have been published, often in local genealogical periodicals.


 * Lists of soldiers' graves

Cemetery Preservation
Transcribing, phographing and videotaping tombstones and records is a tremendous help to people who cannot themselves visit the cemetery. It also preserves the information that may later disappear through erosion, floods, and the like. A new project has been initiated to preserve Saskatchewan's cemeteries. Saskatchewan Cemetery Care and Maintenance Program Liability Waiver form Cemetery Preservation: Preserving Landscapes of Memories

Terms
Cenotaph: engraved on a tombstone indicates an empty grave, with the stone erected in memory or in honor of a person buried elsewhere. Abbreviations are often used on headstones. A list of abbreviations, including military abbreviations, is available online

Locating Cemeteries

 * Maps
 * GPS
 * Rural municipality maps
 * Early Rural municipality maps, Cummins maps and atlases
 * Rural municipality and town histories
 * Land records: deeds, scrip and homesetads
 * Government officials
 * Church officials
 * Mortuary &amp; Funeral directors
 * Local historians
 * Residents
 * Local history books
 * Online search for cemetery name
 * Information gained from obituaries, death certificates, mortuary funeral cards
 * The Family History Library has cemetery records listed in the Locality Search of the Family History Library Catalog under [PROVINCE], [TOWN] - Cemeteries

Funeral directors in the area where your ancestors lived may have records similar to death and cemetery records. Funeral Homes are listed in online telephone directories.

Cemetery records may include an internment record. This record may contain as much information as the cause of death, person making the funeral arrangements and some time periods. The [Cemetery Index] indicates which cemeteries transcribed by the Saskatchewan Genealogy Society have been placed on microfilm at the Family History Libraries.

The library has a few funeral home records listed in the Locality Search of the Family History Library Catalog under the following:

[PROVINCE], [TOWN] - BUSINESS RECORDS AND COMMERCE

[PROVINCE], [TOWN] - FUNERAL HOMES

[PROVINCE] - CEMETERIES

[PROVINCE] - CEMETERIES DIRECTORIES

Saskatchewan - Church records - Inventories, registers, catalogs

Saskatchewan - Church records

Cemetery Addresses
You can find the addresses of Saskatchewan's cemeteries in the listing provided by the Saskatchewan Genealogy Society which lists cemeteries by rural municipality though it is searchable by community and cemetery name as well. [Cemetery Index]