The Hazeldean Cemeteries, Carleton County, Ontario. The Scharf Cemetery, The Hazeldean Union Cemetery, The Wiggans Burial Ground, Maple Grove Cemetery

By Ottawa Branch, Ontario Genealogical Society

This book provides information for four local cemeteries that have served the Hazeldean community. In common with the rest of rural Ontario, the first burials were often made on the homesteads, some of these plots in time growing to become community graveyards. Three of the four cemeteries included herein are of this type.

• The Scharf Cemetery, dating from 1832, served friends and neighbors of the SCHARF family, many like them, from Co. Kilkenny, Ireland. But this graveyard never grew very large, and it is now officially closed.
• The WIGGANS and CLARKE families both established graveyards on their farms around 1870 through provisions made by will. While the Wiggans burial ground never grew beyond its original two graves and was eventually destroyed, CLARKE's Cemetery became the present community cemetery, Maple Grove.
• The other graveyard included was the earlier Union Cemetery, dating probably from the 1840s, located behind the old Union Church which served Hazeldean's almost purely Irish Protestant population. It was gradually supplanted by Maple Grove in the early twentieth century. Some members of the community were buried in the Anglican cemetery at South March or the Methodist Cemetery at Stittsville, both of which have been transcribed and published.

Contents include:

• Introduction
• Scharf Cemetery memorial stone transcriptions
• Hazeldean Union Cemetery memorial stone transcriptions
• Wiggans Burial Ground memorial stone transcriptions
• Maple Grove Cemetery memorial stone transcriptions
• Index   Browse the complete Index

Background:

'The rural area that may be termed the Hazeldean community straddles the boundaries of Goulbourn, March, Huntley and Nepean Townships, and includes roughly the area covered by the section of the Walling Map of 1863. Settlement of the area began in 1818 when it was part of the Richmond Military Settlement, supervised by Col. George Thew BURKE.

BURKE settled here with the 99th-100th Regts. Irish units that were disbanded here after service in the War of 1812. Many of the soldiers settled in the western townships of Carleton County, especially Goulbourn, in which Richmond itself is situated. Settlement of the Hazeldean community proceeded very largely by a process of chain migration, in which one settler was followed to Canada by friends and relatives, whose friends and relatives in turn followed them. Individuals and individual families came, too, but they were outnumbered by those who came in groups and those who came to join friends and relatives already here.

Goulbourn Township is fortunate to have a municipal council that takes its legal responsibilities for the upkeep of its pioneer graveyards seriously. The SCHARF and Union Cemeteries, along with the SHILLINGTON Cemetery further west, were rescued from decay in the 1950s and are a worthy monument to that township's pioneers.' - Bruce S. Elliot

Details

• 72 Pages 
• 8.5 X 11"
• This new edition published by Global Heritage Press, 2017  ISBN 978-1-77240-097-7 (coil bound) 
• Originally published by Ottawa Branch, Ontario Genealogical Society, Ottawa, 2000 and issued as Publication #00-03 (0-7779=1498-0)