Is it blasphemous to want to choke a preacher?

Today I am housebound due to an injury sustained doing laundry...but that is another story and not part of the blog save that I am today stuck in my desk chair because of it. Sigh. Being housebound has its advantages, including the time to get back to those pesky church records and it was several hours of working with my transcripts that have led me to the point of wanting to choke a dead man.

As I've said before I'm trying to get a handle on roughly how many people are buried at Reilly Cemetery. I've been looking for a clear(ish) date on when the Rupert Union Cemetery came into regular use, and thus Reilly Cemetery went OUT of regular use. This date has been somewhat elusive as the early records for the Rupert Union Cemetery do not appear to be readily at hand. In order to get at the information from another direction I have turned back to my negatives of old church records and lo and behold we have a kind, wonderful minister who having been in residence for a few years records the first burial at "Union Cemetery at Masham" of one of his parishioners in 1911 (edit June 26-- this sentence is unitentionally misleading. the record does not say it is the first burial at RUC, it is the first time I came across a reference to RUC, my apologies for the error). Thank you Mark Styan, Methodist Minister of long ago, for making a clear distinction between the two cemeteries in side by side entries made only a few months apart.

Back to my Pastoricidal tendencies...While plowing through the many post 1900 records I came across a whole bunch of records, sequentially listed no less, with no place of residence given and no place of burial. Women are Mrs This or Mrs That, with no maiden name given or the husband's first name omitted. It appears that a certain man of God by the name of Henry A. Young (Methodist minister 1905-1906) was not fond of adding such superfluous details. It is he I would cheerfully choke were he around to be thus done in. There are 12 entries with no useful details in that two year period. Now I can take a guess of course that names like Reilly, McCorkell, Chilcott, Shouldice, Kennedy, Usher or Wood are buried at Reilly Cemetery because these families are often buried there. But what about the Pritchards? Are they at the Pritchard Cemetery or had that closed by then? Alas, guessing is not good enough so I'm putting the lot under the "likely but not guaranteed to be buried at Reilly Cemetery" category.

I think it IS safe to say that burials did not stop at Reilly Cemetery at the stroke of midnight December 31, 1899. I need to prowl around RUC a bit, keeping in mind that headstones get moved, and maybe have a wee look at the Pritchard Cemetery as well if I can find out who to ask for permission. Knowing that headstones have been removed from the Reilly Cemetery in the past, and that headstones/monuments are often made well after the demise of the interred, I will have to give the written record the final word. What this means to little ole me is a great huge pile o' transcriptions yet to be done as I had stopped at 1899... there are about 140 entries in the Presbyterian records that come after that...I don't see this being done before the guided tour but I will do what I can.