Terry St George, formerly of Goulburn, took 60 folk on a virtual tour of Sandgate Cemetery, Newcastle, last Thursday when he was guest speaker at the Goulburn and District Historical Society meeting. Visitors came from Marulan, Yass, Taralga, Gunning and Canberra.
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Terry’s illustrated talk included an overview of Sandgate Cemetery – an old cemetery, which is still in operation as the result of additional land being added to the original grant. Several special projects were described.
Gary Mitchell has undertaken a project to locate the graves of 600 Novocastrians who returned from World War I, and lie buried in Sandgate Cemetery. Two hundred and thirty Novocastrians who died on the battlefields overseas are also recorded on the Memorial Wall. The project is ongoing as it is known there are other, unmarked soldiers’ graves in the cemetery. On adjoining land is a Commonwealth War Graves cemetery recording soldiers who served in World War II.
Another special project recognises the family grief associated with a still born baby. In bygone days, mothers whose babies died at birth were told by hospital and church authorities to ‘forget about them; they never existed’. Thousands of women, many of them now elderly, are still grieving their unrecognised loss. On May 29 in 1999, the Garden of the Innocents was opened in the grounds of Sandgate – a quiet space for families to remember babies lost at birth. A memorial wall lists the babies buried in Sandgate, but by surname and date of death only. Rarely was a given name recorded in the burial records. Fortunately society is better informed now, but the loss of a baby is no less real.
The Sandgate Cemetery burial records have been digitised and can be used by social researchers as well as those interested in family history. Charts can be pulled out to show the deaths per month of any year.
Winter could be assumed to have the greater number of deaths, but epidemics can put a spike in unexpected months. Comparing charts over 10-year intervals might show a significant change in the age at death.
Terry explained how he used his surveyor’s experience, his interest in computer science, Google Earth images, and GPS co-ordinates to identify the location of every burial plot in Sandgate Cemetery. As an add-on project, every headstone was photographed and linked to the digitised records. Now Sandgate Cemetery is open to the world to view at any time, on any day.
Could the cemeteries in Goulburn Mulwaree be opened to the world to view? The greatest obstacle is the poor quality images captured by Google Earth in rural areas, which makes identifying cemetery sections, rows and plots also impossible. Maybe there are ways around this. There was great interest in having local cemeteries mapped.
