How Hamilton Cemetery reveals city's history through Spanish flu, cholera and COVID-19

There's nothing remarkable about the two areas in the Hamilton Cemetery where those who died during the cholera epidemics of 1832 to 1854 or the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 are buried.

Hamilton historian Robin McKee is determined to ensure that people learn about those buried in the Hamilton Cemetery, located on York Boulevard, while ensuring that"the city of the dead" gets the respect it deserves.

McKee is legally blind but sayshe knows the cemetery "like the back of my hand. I'm known as the cemetery guy."

He said the cholera victims were buried in the area that was still the fort for the British soldiers.

"They were buried on the heights before the heights became a cemetery, so in effect they are the first burials in the Hamilton Cemetery," McKee said.

The burial site for the victims of the Spanish flu "is an empty area," McKee said.

"They are all unmarked, except for a few stones in the 1918 Spanish flu area."

According to McKee, about three years agothe City of Hamilton, with the help of ground penetrating radar, discovered that the area where the cholera victims are buried is larger than originally thought.

"There are more bodies there, so they designatedan area for the multiple cholera epidemics," he said.

"So they are going to be putting in a garden area where you can actually walk through the cholera graves. That is there now in its infant stage."

No set site of victims of COVID-19

There is no area designated in the Hamilton Cemetery to bury those who died after contracting COVID-19.

"This pandemic is a lot different than the Spanish flu. Family members are burying their own so there will be no mass area for graves from this pandemic," McKee said.

"It's not as prevalent as it was in 1918 and the reason for that was there were massive deaths daily. We are having daily deaths but they are all individual families that are taking care of their loved ones. So there's not a section that will be put aside just for the victims of this one."

McKee has been offering tours of the Hamilton Cemetery for 20 years.

They are offered voluntarily and include a disaster tour during which people are taken to the burial sites for the Spanish flu and cholera victims.

He was forced to cancel all tours in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"What I did instead was to produce 30 videos and I called them 'A story in the Stones' instead of Stories in the Stones. So there was only one particular story per video," McKee said.

While some might find it surprising, McKee says people are interested in how people die. But he said there were also other factors influencing his decision to do the tours.

"A lot of the local history is not taught in schools and I thought it was a shame that they didn't know how Hamilton existed, who was here, and how things were done," McKee said.

"What also got me motivated to do it was that people went into the cemetery and they pushed over stones and things like that, so there was a lot of damage and I didn't like that, that's disrespectful.

"My idea was to have more people in the cemetery, and learning their local history would eliminate that vandalism. And it cut the vandalism down. It's extremely rare now to have any vandals in the HamiltonCemetery," McKee said.

'I'm a curator of an underground museum'

Meanwhile, McKee said more and more people have come to realize that "it's not a haunted place, it's a place of respect; that they are privately-owned tombstones and that you should give it respect."

"Besides having the respect on the surface you should have the respect of your history that is buried underneath. So I tell people that I'm a curator of an underground museum but I can't dig up any artifacts," McKee said.

"I do have fun with it and at the same time I'm trying to eliminate that idea that a cemetery is haunted or there are ghosts and all that. A cemetery is a place of repose where you bury your loved ones to rest in peace and that respect is necessary for the family and for the society that you live in and the city."

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