Memorial Monument Analysis: Ross Bay Cemetery, Why are there so many dead babies?

      After venturing into Ross Bay Cemetery we settled on a data set of infant graves in the section called Potter‘s Field. A Potter’s Field is a section of graves in a cemetery for people who didn’t have any money for proper burials or family to pay for them either, mainly resulting in impoverished persons, stillborns, and criminals being buried here. This section was located a part F of Ross Bay Cemetery (The Old Cemeteries society of Victoria, 2011). We focused on infant graves from the impoverished section, and wanted to find trends between infant graves between 1867-1900. We decided that comparing it to another group of baby graves would have been too large a task for this project, so we instead tried to focus on Irish infant graves in order to explain irish immigration, and also discovered many anglo-saxon infant graves along the way that helped make up our dataset.

      In the research questions I formulated for looking at the graves, I want to see if I could identify different trends between the grave stones of infants as well as explain why many of the stones had multiple names listed on them, and if I could find out why there were so many baby deaths from 1867-1900.

      From my research on the Ross Bay Cemetery website I was able to find out the section of infant graves we focused on were located in the place for stillborns and the destitute (The Old Cemeteries society of Victoria, 2011). Since I know the origin of the grave site, I feel comfortable claiming that the ten graves we focused on were most likely premature deaths due to the poverty and unsafe living conditions. As we looked at the graves we noticed that a few of the grave stones (#1,2,5,6 & 7) all had more than one name located on the grave stone, which I believe has to do with the impoverished conditions of the burial and a need to save money and time on only one grave. I believe that knowing that the grave is for impoverished persons and finding that half of the graves were for multiple people after studying their inscriptions closely, my question about why so many graves had multiple names is answered. I believe that the high number of grave stones for multiple people,all of which include infants, correlates directly to being from an impoverished family. It's also possible that due to the close range of some of the graves to one another, the bodies of the mass memorial stones may not be buried there. I also believe that because of the impoverished conditions, if a parent was to die and leave an infant behind, the infant may not be recieving the care they need which may explain why grave stone #1 was marked with an inscription that was for a 69 year old mother who died one year before her young daughter, who died in 1900.

 I also looked into the origins of the names on the tomb stones from a basic internet name search, and 4/10 graves (#1,4,5, & 7) were all of Irish descent, and the rest of Anglo-Saxon descent (Name Origin Research, 2009). While this isn't 100% scientific, the knowledge from the database and my knowledge of Irish surnames was enough to make me confident to be able to hypothesize that due to the time period that most of these deaths occurred (between 1867-1900), it coincides with the Irish potato famine that occurred from 1845-1849 (McGowan 2007). Because the Irish potato famine happened under 20 years before the deaths occurred, and knowing that the graves in our dataset were mostly of Irish or Anglo-Saxon descent I believe that the reason for the large amount of Irish and Anglo-Saxon infant graves in Ross Bay Cemetery could possibly be due to the failure to thrive in Canada after relocating from Ireland. As McGown states in his article, Grosse Isle near Quebec was a huge recieving post for people emigrating from Ireland to escape the potato famnine (2007). The harsh conditions of the boats on the way over caused Typhus to spread rapidly in Canada. It's possible that these deaths in Victoria could have resulted from poor health and exposure to Typhus from emigrating to canada in poor conditions (McGowan 2007). He states that by 1861 over 2 million people left Ireland, so immigration was going on until the early 60's, it could correlate with the deaths seen in Victoria seen in our dataset that begin in 1867.

      So although I can't be 100% sure whether our dataset of infant graves were victims of the Irish potato famine and a failed attempt at settling in after immigration, I can be certain that due to the location of the graves in the cemetery, it was most likely impoverished conditions that caused the majority of these babies died prematurely. I also believe that since half of the grave stones were for multiple people, we can claim that this was done to save time and money, and there's a possibility that the bodies weren't buried there at all and we're just looking at a reminder of their lives in cold stone.

here's our map of Irish and Anglo-Saxon infant burials!


View Ross Bay European Infant and Children Burials in a larger map

Bibliography

McGowan, Mark. 2007. Famine, Facts and Fabrication: An Examination of Diaries from the Irish Famine Migration to Canada, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 33(2), p. 48-55.


The Old Cemeteries Society of Victoria. 2011, "Religious Partitions at Ross Bay Cemetery", Old Cemeteries Society of Victoria [online] available at
http://www.oldcem.bc.ca/cem_rb_par.htm

Origin Name Research. 2007, "Surname Database: Last Name Origins", The Internet Surname Database [online] available at
http://www.surnamedb.com