RootsChat.Com
Research in Other Countries => Canada => Topic started by: Westoe on Tuesday 14 March 17 06:10 GMT (UK)
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Mountain View Cemetery, Vancouver has a free online searchable database, but! .... I can find no way of searching by plot number to find out whom else may be buried with the people whom I know are buried there - potentially other distant relatives whose names and death dates are so far unknown to me.
Can anyone here give me any tips for manipulating this database?
https://covapp.vancouver.ca/BurialIndex/ (https://covapp.vancouver.ca/BurialIndex/)
At the moment I am sure of 5 distant relatives there - one husband and wife pair in the same plot plus an infant grandson in the adjoining plot and another husband and wife pair side by side in adjoining plots but I can find those because I already know their names and DoD's. What I want to do is prospect all the burials 3 or 4 plots each way from those people but the search engine requires either a name or a month and year or a date range.
Date range would be the massageable search parameter except that the cemetery is so large that, even with small ranges, my searches return too many records to be shown and, even then, I would have to look at every one to see if the plot numbers are close enough to be suggestive.
Searching by name doesn't work because the names that I do know are very commonly-occurring ones that again return too many results.
Does anyone know if this information exists in any other form on any other website?
Cheers,
Westoe
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Could you post who you are looking for and their dates of death.
Pretty hard to find someone without this information. I can check at the cemetery for you if you can post that info.
The cemetery records would know if there is more that one person in a plot and they can tell who is buried there.
Cheers
Lilybell
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Hello Lilybell,
Thank you for this reply. Are you really able to visit that cemetery office in person? That would be splendid and I could PM you offlist with the known plot numbers.
As my narrowly-focussed question was about technique for extracting information from that database, I quite deliberately named no names in my original post. RootsChatters are kind and eager to help, but many times are "too eager" and often don't read/take in the actual question being asked. I mean no offence by this remark but had I named names, I'd have to be sitting here writing obligatory thank-you's to people for wasting their time and mine in "re-inventing the wheel" and flooding me with information I already have.
I am not looking for anyone in particular. I just want to "prospect" the areas immediately adjacent to my known graves, just as I would have a look at names up and down the block when I find a new relative in the census. I've picked up valuable leads that way.
Cheers,
Westoe
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Dear all,
BINGO! and another BINGO!
#1 I emailed the cemetery today to ask about searching by plot numbers. They replied tonight and I copy the information:
The web app does have limited search abilities. Some of those limitations will be addressed when the Open Data set is released on the City of Vancouver website.
http://vancouver.ca/your-government/open-data-catalogue.aspx
The complete list of all interments and all grave sites will be part of that release. With access to that data, people looking for broader search options be able to do so with the complete data list. The data is in the final few weeks of review and documentation and should be available soon.
#2 But .... I had spent most of the evening following my nose around the internet trying to find the information I wanted somewhere else and I lucked into finding this temporary site which has exactly what I was hunting:
http://former.vancouver.ca/commsvcs/NONMARKETOPERATIONS/MOUNTAINVIEW/burials/burials.htm (http://former.vancouver.ca/commsvcs/NONMARKETOPERATIONS/MOUNTAINVIEW/burials/burials.htm)
So ... there you go any fellow RootsChatters who looked at this post because you also have an interest in Mountain View Cemetery records - that link gives you thousands of them to look through.
Cheers,
Westoe
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Hi Westoe
I have many relatives I know are buried there and now, thanks to your posting, I may find more. I appreciate your taking the time to share this information. Thank you. Marion
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There is a free downloadable app for your phone or tablet ...called Icemetery available for android or apple btw...It includes MountainView cemetery... Not sure how recent they go for burials though.
Jeff