Looking for Thistles in Stone Gardens: The Cemeteries of Nova Scotia’s Scottish Immigrants1

By focusing on the burial sites of northeastern Nova Scotia’s Scottish immigrants, this article demonstrates that their cemeteries were varied and complex places, which defy a uniform reading. An analysis of such metrics as Gaelic language use, stated place of origin (i.e., parish, county, Scotland or North Britain), prevalence of thistle images and Christian iconography gives a verbal and visual dimension to the discussion of whether death was a catalyst for conformist expression among Scottish immigrants and whether they opted for pictorial or linguistic signifiers of identity. In their cemeteries, Scottishness was negotiated, new meanings of belonging forged, status aspirations articulated, and religious differences spatially enforced. It is in their last resting places that one sees vividly displayed the forces of change and continuity, tradition and innovation, and retention and adjustment, which reshaped their lives and deaths as immigrants.

Documents in Stone: Records of Lives and Deaths of Scots Abroad and in Scotland

It is a striking fact that imperial peoples seem to have a powerful desire to commemorate the dead as grandly as possible. This was certainly true of the British Empire as some grandly overblown cemeteries in India and South-East Asia amply testify. This chapter discusses why this might be true – examining the influence of exoticism, a sense of heroic lives (often cut short since the exotic is also dangerous), a search for immortality, in some cases a desire for racial distancing, plus the fact that materials and labour were perhaps cheaper than at home. Some memorials, notably in cathedrals and churches, were however produced by some of the most notable sculptors of the day and were exported at considerable cost. As far as Scottish graves are concerned, it is an extraordinary fact that many families seem to have had a desire to commemorate the deaths of relatives overseas, even although their bodies were buried in distant places. Thus, a scattered family might be brought together on a single stone. This chapter is illustrated with examples of both these phenomena and discusses why diasporic imperial deaths were noticed so prominently.

Irish Memorialisation in South Australia, 1850–99

The extent to which expressions of ‘Irishness’ were materialised in the new colony of South Australia through tangible material culture provides an avenue for archaeologists to explore. Given the highly symbolic and communicative functions of cemetery material culture, expressions of ‘Irishness’ may be found in the memorialisation of death and remembrance. The relatively low proportion of Irish settlers in this colony resulted in the Irish being invisible in a number of ways: their narratives are not dominant in the foundation of the state. This chapter explores the degree to which cultural traditions were incorporated in the material culture of Irish graves, and what this implies for expressions of ‘Irishness’ in South Australia, with some expression of Irish culture being maintained through memorialisation though with subtle, rather than overt, symbolism and text.

Imposing Identity: Death Markers to ‘English’ People in Barbados, 1627–1838

The headstones and epitaphs marking the death of English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish settlers on the Caribbean island of Barbados provide one of the earliest and most complete examples of British death culture overseas. Whilst the island was dominated by plantation slavery during the period in question, the surviving memorials from this period reveal little trace of the chattel slavery that made the island of great geopolitical importance to the British Empire. Instead the memorials examined here demonstrate a deep attachment to the ‘English’ identities of those who died in diaspora. The chapter compares such death culture with that of Jewish settlement on the island, a stream of evidence that demonstrates the island was a sanctuary for Jewish men, women and children from numerous countries during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Scottish Gravestones in Ceylon in Comparative Perspective

In the nineteenth century, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) was acclaimed as a ‘Scotch’ colony due especially to Scottish influence in the coffee and tea enterprises. Yet if Scottish ethnicity was hailed for economic prowess on the island, signs of origin were far less likely to feature on migrant headstones. Instead, noting occupation and cause of death were more prevalent ways of commemorating the deceased. What though, explains the general absence of Scottish ethnicity on Ceylon death markers and do they resemble the general disinterest in remembering the ethnic origins of the dead of various other national groups in Ceylon? How did such headstones compare with their compatriots in Australasia? This chapter draws on research emanating from several cemeteries in Ceylon to explore reasons for the presence and absence of ethnicity on the gravestones.

Forgetting and Remembering: Scots and Ulster Scots Memorials in Eighteenth-century Ulster, Pennsylvania and Nineteenth-century New South Wales

Mortuary monuments were used by Scots and Ulster Scots as they selectively chose to forget or remember their origins once they settled in new lands around the world. Those who moved to Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century and New South Wales in the nineteenth century employed different strategies regarding how they would create their identities and promote or discard aspects of their origins. Burial monument texts look back over the deceased’s life, but they are also selected by the living to create publicly visible family history and affiliation. Through both text and symbol on the memorials, families create visible, meaningful, biographies. Using survey data from Pennsylvania and New South Wales collected to investigate diasporic remembering and forgetting, this analysis recognises a widespread prevalence of forgetting and an increasing interest in creating new identities in the colonial context. However, some saw their origins as part of their identity and this formed part of the visible family biography.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter synthesises the key findings and theoretical points raised in this multidisciplinary collection and reinforces the richness and diversity of memorialisation at home and abroad during four centuries of British and Irish settlement overseas. Alert to the material composition of stones, their locations, symbolism, traditions of remembrance, and cross-cultural adaptation, contributors to this book show that gravestones were very public statements about the religious, geographic, economic, political and ethnic identities of European’s dying abroad. The collective findings suggest not just the evolution of a global death industry, but also the transfer of cultural practices by most societies wherever these migrants settled.

Introduction – Death in the Diaspora: British and Irish Gravestones

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the historical use of headstones and epitaphs in the commemoration of death during the period of British overseas imperialism between c.1608 and 1960. It examines the ways that previous scholars from a number of disciplines have interpreted such memorials and highlights the book’s specific contribution to both death studies and diaspora studies. Each chapter in the volume seeks to compare and contrast different temporal and spatial contexts, including Europe, North America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and Australasia, to explore how and why British and Irish migrants and their families and friends tried to display attachment to home on gravestones.

Memorialising the Diasporic Cornish

And Shall These Mute Stones Speak? asked Professor Charles Thomas in his seminal book of the same name (University of Wales Press, 1994), arguing that in the early medieval period, with its paucity of documentary records, the inscribed standing stones of Cornwall were the best evidence for the existence of early Cornish people. The inference was that, in the modern era, with its multiplicity of sources and data, it was hardly necessary to resort to such devices. However, the ‘mute stones’ of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century Cornish diaspora – the grave stones of Cornish emigrants in cemeteries as disparate as Pachuca in Mexico and Moonta in South Australia – are vivid insights into the Cornish diasporic experience. Their location in often remote areas are testament to the extent of Cornish diasporic dispersal, while the inscriptions on individual gravestones are themselves important sources of social and cultural history. Moreover, these cemeteries and gravestones have served collectively and individually as memorials to the diasporic Cornish, often organised into distinctive ‘Cornish’ sections in graveyards, and are today explicit sites of remembrance – as in the ‘Dressing the Graves’ ceremony performed at Moonta, Wallaroo and Kadina during the biennial ‘Kernewek Lowender’ Cornish festival on South Australia’s northern Yorke Peninsula.