HRM Cemeteries
HRM refers to the "Halifax Regional Municipality", the result of a government-mandated consolidation a number of years ago of the City of Halifax, the City of Dartmouth, and the County of Halifax. Halifax is the capital of Nova Scotia, and the centre of a regional district of some 1.35 million acres. The population of the municipality may break 500,000 persons in 2024, but the population is overwhelmingly concentrated in the Halifax-Dartmouth urban area.
The best estimate we have is that there are some 250 cemeteries in HRM. GANS has records for 93 of these, with about 32,000 cemetery stone images, less than 25% of which are accessible on our website. None of our cemetery stones have GPS co-ordinates.
The Board has committed funds to begin an initial project to map the existing cemetery locations and experiment with mapping stone locations in a few cemeteries at "sub-foot" accuracy. The model of the big genealogy companies - Ancestry-Find-a-Grave and Billion-Graves for cemeteries - in which volunteers collect and privatize genealogical information so that profit-seeking companies can be successful is totally absurd.
We are going to fight back.
