After years of using the Find a Grave website to support the construction of my own family tree, I decided it was time to start giving back.

I live in SW Etobicoke and the cemetery closest to me is the Ontario Lakeshore Asylum Cemetery (OLAC), where I currently manage about half of the ~1500 memorial pages. Given that there are few grave markers at the cemetery (burials there began in the 1890s, but grave markers weren't required until the late 1950s), many of the Find a Grave entries for the people buried at OLAC are thin on information – I am working to more fully complete these entries, including linking those buried to identifiable family members who are buried elsewhere and have Find a Grave IDs.

I'm also interested in improving the entries of persons who passed away at the Asylum/Ontario Hospital, but are buried elsewhere.

Another itch that I'm currently scratching (from a distance) is burials in the Province of Alberta pre-1900 (I grew up in and was educated in Medicine Hat and Edmonton)

And as of September 2022, my latest itches are the Brandon Mental Health Centre Cemeteries. There are a lot of empty memorial pages there.

...and my itch as of October 2023 - getting plot locations updated at Mount Pleasant Cemetery for memorial pages that don't have a photo...currently 4,280 of these remain. Update - as of mid-January 2024, there are now under 2,500. Making progress. :). Final update - early-March 2024 - the project is over and there are now under 600 memorials at Mount Pleasant Cemetery without a cemetery photo that don't have a plot location. Some of these may be resolved in time, others will probably never be resolved.

As for what I manage - it's just crossed over 2,500 memorials - fairly small in the grand scheme of Find a Grave.

I appreciate receiving edits that improve the quality of the memorial pages - I pretty much send a source for any edit I submit. My preference is for you to provice sources when submitting edits for any of the pages I manage. If I can't confirm your edit via the resources that I have, I'll reach out to you to confirm your source (it's challenging if you are set up to not receive messages.)

Also, happy to transfer management to family members or those in better position to improve the memorial.

Thanks for reading and thank you for your contributions to a valuable online resource that documents and preserves genealogical knowledge.

Blair

After years of using the Find a Grave website to support the construction of my own family tree, I decided it was time to start giving back.

I live in SW Etobicoke and the cemetery closest to me is the Ontario Lakeshore Asylum Cemetery (OLAC), where I currently manage about half of the ~1500 memorial pages. Given that there are few grave markers at the cemetery (burials there began in the 1890s, but grave markers weren't required until the late 1950s), many of the Find a Grave entries for the people buried at OLAC are thin on information – I am working to more fully complete these entries, including linking those buried to identifiable family members who are buried elsewhere and have Find a Grave IDs.

I'm also interested in improving the entries of persons who passed away at the Asylum/Ontario Hospital, but are buried elsewhere.

Another itch that I'm currently scratching (from a distance) is burials in the Province of Alberta pre-1900 (I grew up in and was educated in Medicine Hat and Edmonton)

And as of September 2022, my latest itches are the Brandon Mental Health Centre Cemeteries. There are a lot of empty memorial pages there.

...and my itch as of October 2023 - getting plot locations updated at Mount Pleasant Cemetery for memorial pages that don't have a photo...currently 4,280 of these remain. Update - as of mid-January 2024, there are now under 2,500. Making progress. :). Final update - early-March 2024 - the project is over and there are now under 600 memorials at Mount Pleasant Cemetery without a cemetery photo that don't have a plot location. Some of these may be resolved in time, others will probably never be resolved.

As for what I manage - it's just crossed over 2,500 memorials - fairly small in the grand scheme of Find a Grave.

I appreciate receiving edits that improve the quality of the memorial pages - I pretty much send a source for any edit I submit. My preference is for you to provice sources when submitting edits for any of the pages I manage. If I can't confirm your edit via the resources that I have, I'll reach out to you to confirm your source (it's challenging if you are set up to not receive messages.)

Also, happy to transfer management to family members or those in better position to improve the memorial.

Thanks for reading and thank you for your contributions to a valuable online resource that documents and preserves genealogical knowledge.

Blair