COLUMN: Tales from the Gravel Ridge – Memories of the Rosengard Cemetery and beyond

The history of a community is, in part, and by its very nature, a history of the individuals who helped to shape that neighbourhood. That is so even if their lives may have been brief. It is a solemn thought that all of us in one way or another, have and continue to have a part in the story of a community.

In my family, those of us who survived into adulthood received part of our formal education at the Rosengard School No. 2168. That means that all of us who were already somewhat articulate in both German and Mennonite Low German, could now communicate in English as well. That early introduction to a formal education paved the way for each of us to move on into the larger world, finding meaningful employment, as well as our place in the larger world.

Cemeteries, especially in a relatively small, somewhat homogeneous community, can draw people together. Usually the individual who is being buried in such a situation is known to the rest of the community. Such is the Rosengard cemetery.

My first recollection of being at the Rosengard cemetery is not during a burial service, but rather one of members of our family tending the gravesite of my brother Erich, who died on May 23, 1946, at the tender age of thirteen months. And, invariably when we looked after Erich’s burial site, we also tended to that of my five-year-old sister Agatha, who was buried in the Rosengard cemetery in June, 1943, having died after a brief illness of cancer of her kidneys. At the same time we also paid our respects to my father’s sister Elizabeth Enns who died of tuberculosis in 1933 and is also buried in that cemetery.

When you are a member of a large family, as in my case, you have many occasions to mourn the death of a loved one, but you also are surrounded by others who care, and that was surely the case in Rosengard.

In a sense much of the story of Rosengard and the people who are buried there is also the story of the rest of us, for we have all left our imprint in that community.

My husband Bernie and I have also had occasion to mourn as well as to share memories of the deaths of his loved ones, and once again it was that sense of community, being members of the extended family or of friends and others who shared those solemn occasions with us.

When Bernie and I were part of a Mennonite Heritage cruise in Ukraine in 2001, we were able to visit the cemetery in Smolyane in Ukraine, formerly the Mennonite village of Schoeneberg. We found the house in which my paternal grandparents had lived, and later my own parents and my eldest siblings. That experience was very enriching. What was especially memorable however is the visit we made to the local cemetery. It was here that we found the gravestone of my grandfather, Heinrich Jakob Falk, the only gravestone still standing in the Mennonite section of the cemetery. Inscribed on the gravestone were the German words from the Book of Job 19:25, “Ich weiss dasz mein Erloeser lebt”, translated from German : “I know that my Redeemer lives”.

Gravesites, no matter where we find them, always have a story to tell. So too when we visited the cemetery at York Factory on Hudson Bay, in August, 1998.

Particularly poignant were the markers indicating the graves of children and young people. One such gravestone, erected by John and Annie Spence, read: “Sacred to the memory of” and then listed their four children: William aged 4 years, 26 August 1904; Lydia aged 2 months, 11 September 1904; Alfred aged 16, 15 December 1905; and Jessie Harriet aged 5, 19 July, 1910. The inscription read: “Thou shalt keep them O Lord. Psalm XII.7.”

The cemetery was also a reminder of the fleeting nature of our earthly achievements, as evidenced by the headstone for William Sinclair Esq, a Chief Factor, for the Hudson’s Bay Company at York Factory, who died at age 52 on April 20, 1818. The inscription read: “Behold thou hast made my days as an handbreadth: and mine age is as nothing before thee: verily every man at his last estate is altogether vanity.”