Just because it's written in stone...

doesn't make it so. The Reilly Cemetery has a number of headstones that were consolidated on to a cement pad decades ago by the Mitchell Family. The interesting thing is that there exists two lists of the headstones at Reilly Cemetery, one that predates the consolidation (Elliot 1972) and one that came after (Toll 1991 I believe). The lists don't match. I was told that the Shouldice headstones were moved to Rupert Union Cemetery, and since they are on Elliot's list and not Toll's we can surmise that they were moved in the interim period. No one mentioned that the Shannon headstone had been moved as well-- I found that headstone by happy accident at Rupert Union Cemetery when I was recording the Shoudice monuments. According to the records Mr Shannon was indeed buried at Reilly Cemetery. Local history and wisdom says that no bodies were moved, though I could check that through BANQ (thanks for that tip, CM!). In another case there is a headstone at Reilly Cemetery for a Mitchell who is buried on his farm according to the records but there isn't one for another Mitchell who is buried at RC.  And that's another point-- there are often far more people buried at pioneer cemeteries than there are markers (Martin 2005). This is why I went through all those records, to see if I could find out how many people were there, who was there, and who might have been forgotten. Another problem with trusting the information on headstones is that they are often created long after the death of the individual  (Martin  2005)or sometimes family members relied on others to record the information-- this leads to interesting spellings of names, incorrect dates, and perhaps even the wrong family member being commemorated at a given place. So this means that what you see in a graveyard really should be regarded as a starting point and not necessarily all there is to know about a burial.

My thanks to a reader who pointed out that Fairbairn Lake (as it is called on the topographical maps) is now known locally as Reilly Lake.