Cemetaries can provide a wealth of information for people interested in family and community history, with headstones and plaques as records of how a community and its residents are born, live and die.
Family history consultant Brenda Smith has visited cemetaries throughout B.C. for research and says Coquitlam's is one of the best post-modern examples she's seen.
It offers traditional burial with granite headstones, engraved boulders that are tucked into woodland nooks, places for urns, and gardens for scattering ashes.
The oldest graves, on the south side of the grounds, tell different stories: individual headstones often state only birth and death.
They are formal and, if decorated at all it's only with symbols such as a cross or a Mason's instrument. Although Scandinavian names are not common in the city's popular history, they are numerous in the cemetery, as are Robinson, Poirier, Christmas and other families that are also remembered in city street names.
On the newer, north side headstones are more expressive, benefiting from advances in laser etching. In this part of the cemetery are stones with etchings of fly-fishing, golf, and on one, barbells.
Many of the commemorative boulders holding urns located at the edge of a grove have extravagantly decorated settings, including mementos woven into tree branches, photographs, poems, lanterns with candles and other tokens of remembrance.
Cemeteries are not for recreation, but they are public places and the Coquitlam cemetary's caretaker encourages to visitors, guiding them to the chronology and features that might otherwise be overlooked, such as the wildlife trees, which are crags left for woodpeckers to feed at, and bird feeders. All that is needed of visitors is respect.
