Canterbury City Cemeteries
Online Project

Canterbury City Cemeteries Online project began in 2000 when family historian, Mary-Anne Warner, offered to prepare the burial registers, photographs of headstones and other material held in the Canterbury City Council Library Service Local History Collection for publication on Canterbury City Council's website. It became a joint effort between Mary-Anne Warner, Catherine Hardie and Canterbury City Council Library Service. Mary-Anne Warner volunteered to check and update the available information from a number of sources in cooperation with Catherine Hardie and Local History staff, assisted with photographing the remaining headstones, compiled and prepared the project for electronic publication.

The project was based upon the earlier work of:

  • Canterbury & District Historical Society collected, collated and published the burial records and two members of the Society, Joyce Ormsby and Audrey Barnes, compiled the books. If it were not for the work and dedication of the Society and its members, much of this information would not be available today.
  • Maxine Shaw produced a survey of St Saviour’s Cemetery, as a University assignment, and donated the results to Canterbury City Council Library Service’s Local History Collection. This assignment included some photographs of the cemetery grounds and individual headstones as well as historical and statistical information. When told of Canterbury City Cemeteries Online project, Maxine gladly gave permission to use her assignment and photographs on our website. Some of these photographs are now online for easy access by researchers world-wide.
    • Canterbury City Council is custodian of the surviving original records for Moorefield’s Cemetery.
    • In 1984, Grayson Gerrard was employed by Council to photograph the headstones and grounds of St Paul’s Cemetery, Canterbury. It is planned to link these photographs, deposited in the Library’s Local History Collection, to the burial records online.

Canterbury Cemeteries Online Project Team:

  • Mary-Anne Warner is webmaster at a large state-wide educational institution. She is a very experienced genealogist and maintains two of her own family history sites and has published other genealogy material on the web. She spoke about web publishing at the 2002 Royal Australian Historical Society Conference. Her own sites are:

     

    • Mariners and Ships in Australian Waters.  This site represents the original transciption and indexing of Passengers and Crew arrivals in Sydney.  State Records Authority of New South Wales: Shipping Masters Office: CGS 13278, Passengers Arriving 1855 – 1922.  The site will shortly be hosted on the Records NSW web server. http://www.records.nsw.gov.au/Mariners Additional information is included from daily Shipping Columns in newspapers of the 1870s
    • Genies’ Jottings – Lists, lists and more lists.  Australian and New Zealand names from various sources, includes 10,000+ soldiers from the Boer and World War 1 as well as ordinary folk at agricultural shows, schools, etc. http://www.ozlists.com/genies/
  • Catherine Hardie is Images/Family History Librarian in Canterbury City Council Library Service’s Local History Team. She has 20 years experience working in local and family history, and has been instumental in the design, scope and content of the extensive range of local history information and photographs accessible on Council’s website. Catherine has spoken at a number of seminars organized by the NSW branch of the Australian Library and Information Association about Canterbury City Council’s website and using the web for local history and photographs. Catherine is a committee member of this organisation. Catherine conducts Family History on the Internet training courses for genealogists at Canterbury City Council Library, and is an active member of the Canterbury & District Historical Society, Honorary Member of Canterbury Genealogy Discussion Group and editor of this society's journal - The Canterbury Bell. www.canterbury.nsw.gov.au/history/cantbell/bellmag.htm
  • Canterbury City Council Library Service co-ordinated this project and will continue to add biographical and pictorial material about these pioneers and their families, who are buried in the cemeteries, as it comes to hand – mostly via loan or donation.