Over the past five years, members of the Echuca-Moama Family History Group have been detailing and discovering some of these stories.
The members — headed by group president and project coordinator Judy McCleary — have been compiling and digitising the records from 10 cemeteries in the Campaspe Shire, at Corop, Colbinabbin, Kyabram, Patho, Pannoo-Bamawm, Rochester, Runnymede, Rushworth, Tongala and Whroo.
The records include the information contained in the registers and burial books from each cemetery, as well as photographs of every grave and memorial headstone within the cemetery, as well as the original maps of the cemeteries.
They estimate they’ve taken a total of 5900 photographs in the smaller cemeteries, and 19,020 for the larger cemeteries in Kyabram and Rochester.
During the course of the project, the group has uncovered stories hiding in plain sight in our cemeteries, for example, the Wren Mausoleum at the Echuca Cemetery.
The structure of the Wren Mausoleum was built with see-through panes installed in the sides, and a story emerged that Alfred Wren, when he was buried in the mausoleum, was to have a flag placed in his hand.
Mr Wren’s family and friends were to come and check on him after his burial, and if the flag raised, they were to release him.
The group does not know whether the story was fact or fiction, and the sides of the mausoleum are now bricked up.
Also in the Echuca Cemetery, there were several sad discoveries made, including the number of children who did not survive birth or early childhood.
The group found that between 1860 and 1900, about three in every five burials was a child under the age of 12, and buried with many of these is their mother who died in childbirth.
There are also a number of noteworthy graves at the Echuca Cemetery.
Henry Hopwood, the founder of Echuca, is buried there, as is Anne Duke, who helped stitch the original Eureka flag in the Ballarat miners’ uprising.
At the back of the cemetery is the Falkiner Grave, the largest monument in the cemetery, dedicated to the Falkiner family who owned and ran Perricoota Station.
Compiling the data from all of the smaller cemeteries across the shire was not an easy undertaking, as it required two people to complete the individual entries in the spreadsheets — one to read the original register and the other to make entries onto the database.
The history group found there was conflicting information about some entries on the original records, and so used state government death records to clarify any conflicting results.
The original time frame for the project was two years, but it was a very large project that required an enormous number of hours to complete, particularly when a small team was working on the task, and it was envisaged that the project would be “an intensive hands-on enterprise with an extremely high labour component”.
The new records will be made available to the public through each cemetery trust and the offices of the Echuca-Moama Family History Group.
The group said grant money from Campaspe Shire Council enabled it to do this project more thoroughly and effectively, and that it had been a significant heritage project for the shire and the cemetery trusts involved.
The trusts will now have detailed digital records that will preserve this historical information for future generations.
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