Death is a mysterious thing, I think we can all agree on that. It only makes sense then, that graveyards also hold their share of mysteries. As a group, we decided to explore the vast Ross Bay Cemetery, with a specific interest in the War memorials and graves. Therefore, it is only natural that we should have questions about such graves. Who were these individuals? how did they die? What was it like to live, fight and die for your country- or is that how they viewed it? Unfortunately, questions such as these are not easily answered, if answerable in today's day and age at all. However, there are other questions which may be more appropriate to examine; this is what we chose:
The first we chose to look into was the positioning of the war graves within the cemetery. The majority of graves were found in two separate sections, one in the lower eastern corner of the cemetery, and one in the lower west. It appeared to us that the graves in the east must have been the earlier ones; this area seemed more dedicated to those who had specifically perished in either of the world wars. Found within this section was also a large memorial commemorating fallen seamen from both wars (this was also one of our mapping points). It seemed possible that this area was originally designated for those who died fighting in the first world war, since nearly all the tomb stones were dated around 1916.
Our next question involved the western area of the graveyard. Here, we found the majority of graves were dated to the mid 1920's. To make things even more puzzling, we found a fair number of them were multiple-burial graves, with a soldier being buried with his wife or even entire family at a single plot. Why was it that these soldiers should be commemorated with their comrades who died in the war, while their deaths took place after the first world war had ended? Why were these soldiers being buried with their families? Perhaps the answer involves something around the real estate of burial. Perhaps these individuals had already purchased burial plots in the grave yard, and that's the reason they were buried with their families. However, the date of their deaths still confuses me, and I honestly have no idea where to find the information to answer it. Here's the link to the map we created: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&oe=UTF8&msa=0&msid=204947318620268261385.0004b84028b3297997c63
Hi Devin,
ReplyDeleteA lot of them likely died from complications caused by injuries during the war. Many of the soldiers came back very wounded and/or sick and were kept in hospitals for years. Unfortunately, when the influenza outbreak hit Victoria ca.1918 it finished many of them off or weakened them further.
I only know this because I was at Ross Bay in January with a friend and we had the same question. We went hunting for answers too!