Day Two: Mount Carmel Cemetery

The view from Mount Carmel. You can
even see the Anglican Cemetery we
visited last time.

This week, Nora and I journeyed out to Mount Carmel Cemetery in St. John's. After the challenge of finding a handful of graves in the Anglican Cemetery a couple of weeks ago, we came much more prepared this time. Luckily for us, the Roman Catholic Archdiocesan website has both very thorough maps of Mount Carmel Cemetery and a searchable database to find plot numbers. We also had some great information given to us by those of you who heard about our project, which is amazing and very appreciated.

The Florizel monument
still stands today.

Plot F195 is home to a monument erected in memory of those who perished in the S.S. Florizel disaster. The four-sided monument has many names inscribed on it, including a number of Spanish firemen who are interred in this plot, and a number of Newfoundlanders who are memorialized on the monument but listed as "interred in family plots in other parts of this cemetery". This monument posed two challenges for us.

The Spanish men as
listed on the
monument.

The first challenge is tracking the records of the Spanish firemen. The challenge is that there are not necessarily excellent records kept of them. A lot of information was passed by word of mouth, whether it be the firemen telling someone their name to write down or a reporter asking an official about them. There were a lot of misspellings of names - some were simple, such as Tomas Garcia being changed to Thomas Garcia. Others, not as much, such as Alegandro Grierio being written as 'Algreiro Grieguries'. Even our records disagree with the spelling simply because every document, monument, and newsprint has an alternative spelling.

Stanley Foley's headstone is
still there but broken into
three pieces.

The second challenge is finding those interred in other plots. We searched beforehand for any possible plots and visited all of them (five for Margaret Keough alone). Unfortunately, out of the seven Newfoundland residents, we were only able to locate two of them. The other five are still yet to be located.

The challenge from this is simply that I am both a perfectionist and a historian. As a result, I struggle to come to grips with the fact that perhaps the final resting place of these five is forever lost to history. The same goes for the Spanish firemen. There are only so many records, so many clues, so many papers that could hold the information we are looking for, and perhaps we will never be able to find it. This certainly does not mean that we have given up on them, it just means that we are going to have to try different research methods, and perhaps we may be able to uncover something.

All that being said, it was a great day to get to go on this journey. The weather was lovely, the view is genuinely stunning, and it was beautiful to see how many people on a Thursday morning came out to leave flowers on the headstones of their loved ones. While we may not have been able to find them all this week, it is a great consolation to know that their final resting place is so peaceful.

I'll leave you with a list of our findings from the day:

Blanche Beaumont: LINK
Kitty McDonald (née Cantwell): LINK
Michael Dunphy: LINK
Stanley Foley: LINK
John Forrest: LINK
Tomas Garcia: LINK
Alejandro Grierio: LINK
Fred Gutherie: LINK
Margaret Keough: LINK
Patrick Lynch: LINK
José Mendez: LINK
Francisco Reguira: LINK
Ramon Rez: LINK
Enrique Rodriguez: LINK
Gerardo Rodriguez: LINK
Manuel Rodriguez: LINK
José Soane: LINK
José Vila: LINK
Manuel Yannez: LINK

-Tim