The common conception that the cemetery holds the memory of all who died and were buried before us is a false one. There were certain biases in who was being commemorated, a form of selectivity to the memorial process, that caused a great number of people to erode from the landscape. The argument is based on observations from a sample of seventeen hundred individuals from the latter half of the nineteenth century in Montreal and surrounding villages. A selection of twelve surnames from archival data includes the three main cultures present in Montreal in the nineteenth century (French Canadians, Irish Catholics and English Protestants) and allows me to reconstitute families, to identify their kinship ties, and to determine their situation in life. Records from the cemeteries on Mount Royal and from the parishes of three rural villages confirm the burial of individuals from the sample. The presence or absence of these individuals in the cemetery landscapes depends on different commemorative practices influenced by religion, culture, gender, status and age.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.30230 |
| Date | January 1999 |
| Creators | Watkins, Meredith G. |
| Contributors | Olson, Sherry (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Department of Geography.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001746881, proquestno: MQ64206, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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