NEW GLASGOW – Bill Graham got up from a lawn chair placed in front of an old family headstone at Riverside Cemetery.
“That stone over there with Graham on it is my father’s – he was born in 1874,” says Graham.
“The stone next to me are cousins of him and mine. One of them is Duncan Fraser, who was known as the Guysborough Giant.”
Graham lives in Mississauga, Ont., and along with his wife Shirley, spent a few days recently cleaning up old family headstones at the New Glasgow cemetery, which has headstones dating back to the 1700s.
His father, grandfather and a host of other ancestors are buried here, which is why \he tries to get back to visit the graveyard each year.
He said the history on display just off Trenton Road should be more widely acknowledged – plenty of prominent Pictou County residents have their final resting place at Riverside cemetery.
“It should be a major tourist attraction.”
His father and uncles grew up in Pictou County, although Bill Graham himself grew up in Sydney, Cape Breton before he moved to southern Ontario 33 years ago.
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“We got on the Web and found out how to do it, and found a place in Montreal that sold the stuff we needed, and we found a bunch of Youtube (videos), which is the way you learn nowadays, and we said, ‘let’s go for it’. My wife was totally 100 per cent supportive.
“We’ve done about probably 25 of them – you’re looking at two or three hours per stone. The smoother they are the better because you’ve got to get all the excess off.”
Shirley Graham (formerly a MacMillan) laughed when asked if she enjoyed being out in the hot weather, doing painstaking work to restore the old headstones.
“You don’t want to know,” she said. “But it’s a good thing to have done, I really enjoy it. You can see a big difference,” in the appearance of the stones that have been refurbished, she added.
