Sharyn Burling outside Dannevirke Settlers' Cemetery where some of the founding families were buried. Photo / Leanne Warr
A family’s efforts to restore a grave in Dannevirke’s Settlers’ Cemetery have been welcomed by its friends group.
Friends of Settlers’ Cemetery coordinator Sharyn Burling said the family of Frederick Fiecken, who was buried there in 1947, came to Dannevirke about nine years ago and found the grave in a dilapidated state.
Frederick was the last of his family to be buried in the plot. His son was the first in 1913, followed by Frederick’s daughter, then wife.
One of the family members worked with concrete and recently was able to restore the grave.
It was not the only grave which had been restored in the cemetery as the Friends have been holding regular working bees to clean and repair some of the headstones, applying for grant funding through Dannevirke Community Board.
Theirs was not the only community group undertaking the maintenance and restoration as there was also a group with the Remembrance Army in Norsewood cleaning and restoring graves.
The Settlers Cemetery was the first in Dannevirke and many of the first families were buried there.
Twenty-one families came from Scandinavia in 1872 to what was then dense bush, to build the town, but only 10 stayed, Burling said.
Pat Mills, who was one of the first members of the Friends of the Settlers’ Cemetery, wrote a book about it, writing that it was “unique in that it is a history of the development of a small community starting from scratch.”
Now the graves are all that remains of those original families, but they serve as a reminder to their descendants, who were often invited along to organised walks at the cemetery to learn the stories of their ancestors.
Those stories often helped people learn not just who their ancestors were but also to understand and connect to their family history.
“It’s about the genealogy,” Burling said.
Genealogy has had something of a resurgence in the past few years, and it has only grown with websites like Ancestry or Latter Day Saints’ Family Search.
“People really want to know a little bit about their heritage,” Burling said.
The New Zealand Genealogy Society, which began in 1967, kick-started the interest in family history, she said, while websites like Ancestry were “brilliant tools”.
“But we’ve got to be careful not to just copy and paste.”
Online records were not necessarily accurate and further research was always necessary to back up those records.
“I think it is about finding the information and building a picture.”
Cemetery records and learning the stories of those buried there helped build that picture.
But time and environmental factors meant some graves could get damaged, which could often be disappointing to some of the family members, like Burling, who had gone looking for an ancestor’s grave only to find overgrown vegetation blocking her path, and a local authority which seemed rather indifferent to her plight.
Sometimes restoration would require fixing headstones broken either by the elements or by vandalism.
Other times, only the wording would require restoring.
“You can’t read some of them,” Burling said. “There’s no point if you can’t read them.”
There were times when a search for relatives would come up with some surprises, and cemetery records would often provide at least some answers.
For instance, Burling said in the Settlers’ Cemetery, not far from the Fiecken family plot, was that of a baby in an unmarked grave, which they discovered was also part of the family.
She said the descendants would eventually make a concrete block and plaque to connect the baby to the family plot.
Searches on Births, Deaths and Marriages could often uncover such surprises.
“You can put in the names, particularly the mother and get all the children. And suddenly you go, they had a child named James Wilbur, but nobody’s talked about him.”
Burling said searches through other resources, such as school records or marriage records could often provide at least a direction of where to go next.
She said death records might reveal that there was an infant death or a stillbirth.
“In those days, particularly in stillbirths, it was ‘oh, that’s sad, just get on with life’. They didn’t talk about them.”
Burling felt there was far more to it than just restoring the graves or keeping the area neat and tidy for those for whom the cemetery was their final resting place.
“We’re honouring them,” she said, adding that she felt those buried there would be grateful they were being acknowledged and their memories kept alive.
A walk of the Settlers’ Cemetery is planned for March next year and planning was also underway for a second one in September to mark 130 years of Women’s Suffrage in New Zealand.
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