Final touches ready for gravestone project

Phyllis and Peter McLennan are just weeks away from completing the Gravestone Project to honour those in unmarked graves at Ellesmere Cemetery.

February 28, 2024

By Rachel Williams

A painstaking project to formally identify the bodies of 245 people buried at Scottsdale’s Ellesmere Cemetery is nearing completion, with the final plaques set to be laid in the next two months.

Phyllis and Peter McLennan have been humbled by the four-year journey to recognise those in unmarked graves.

“We get a lot of satisfaction out of it,” Mrs McLennan said.

“Especially with the babies – we have given a name to a dent in the ground,” Mr McLennan said.

The babies he speaks of number 35 and were buried during 1865-1930 but any commemoration of them had long disappeared – until now.

“They used to have wooden crosses because it was so far from Launceston to get any masonry done, plus they were as poor as church mice and with all the blackberries that were there and the amount of times it had been burnt out over the years, plus cattle and horses had got in through the fences and it had just been decimated,” Mr McLennan said.

“Three years ago we were up here visiting our relatives’ graves and we saw in the old part there were so many unmarked graves – more unmarked than marked.

“Leslie Cox over the fence, one of the original Coxs, had this hand drawn map which  was a real help with working out who was buried where, but nothing was numbered and a lot of it was incorrect with dates of when they were buried not when they died.

“My brother Roger has got over 300,000 names of people in the area with the genealogy he does, he has corrected the mistakes and then we go to the Council and they go through the database and correct dates and spelling of names for the plaques to be made.”

Working with the Dorset Tasmania History Society to achieve a funding grant from Dorset Council initially, the dynamic duo had completed 210 unmarked graves before the Dorset Council was suspended.

“After a conversation and site visit with Commissioner Andrew Wardlaw, we have received $835 to finish the project entirely,” he said.

“Andrew heard about what we do and we met him up here at the cemetery and we explained we were 35 head stones short for the baby’s section … and he said ‘the cheque is in the mail’.

“The best part is that money finishes what we started.

“A third of the people buried in the area would have descendants who are
still in the area and by contacting the families to get permission to do bits and pieces they have started to take over and we have noticed a lot of the grounds have been done because they have now found out where grandma or grandad are buried.”

The project will have cost $5200 in total when completed.