The BC Penitentiary cemetery as it appeared in May 2003. Copyright © 2003 Deborah McIntosh

• Is the cemetery publicly accessible? How do I get there?
• How did you find out about the cemetery?
• How can I confirm the identities of the men buried in the cemetery?
• Are the men buried in the cemetery survived by family members?
• Do you know the identity of every individual buried in the cemetery?
• Is the BC Penitentiary cemetery located near/in the same place as the Woodlands cemetery?
• Who owns the cemetery? Who is responsible for its upkeep?

Information about men buried in the BC Penitentiary cemetery?

• Why were the men buried in the cemetery incarcerated in the first place?
• Are there any women buried in the BC Penitentiary cemetery?
• Were any of the men buried in the cemetery executed?
• Are there any First Nations or Aboriginal men buried in the cemetery?
• What nationality were the other men buried in the cemetery?
• How did the men buried in the BC Penitentiary cemetery die?

History of the BC Penitentiary cemetery

• During what period of time was the cemetery in use?
• Where were BC Penitentiary inmates buried before 1912 and after 1968?

General

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How did you find out about the cemetery?
When I moved to Sapperton in 2001 I developed an interest in the fate of the former BC Penitentiary -- a place I remembered vividly from childhood drives along the Fraser River. Nosing around on the internet to see what I could learn, I came across Victoria genealogist Hugh Armstrong's list of Convict Deaths in the British Columbia Penitentiary, 1875 - 1916. From there my imagination took hold, and I began to wonder where inmates who had died in the penitentiary had been buried, and what became of their burial place after the Pen's closure. The New Westminster Public Library has in its collection a book by local historian Helen C. Pullem entitled The Not So Gentle Art of Burying the Dead: The Real Story of How Cemeteries Began in New Westminster, which along with Jack Scott's Four Walls in the West contain the only published references to the cemetery. Once I learned of the cemetery's existence from these books, and confirmed through New Westminster researcher Archie Miller that the place still existed, finding it was pretty straightforward.

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How can I confirm the identities of the men buried in the cemetery?
Since the headstones at the cemetery provide only anonymous prisoner numbers (no names or dates), learning the names of the men buried in the cemetery was the most challenging aspect of my research. When I began this project in 2003, there were no official records available listing the names of those interred in the cemetery (neither the City of New Westminster nor the Correctional Service of Canada had maintained a list following the penitentiary's closure). By word of mouth, I learned that a handful of individuals formerly associated with the penitentiary had kept copies of a 1980 blueprint, which included the names of the deceased cross-referenced to the prisoner numbers on the headstones. I was finally able to convince one such individual to share this blueprint with me.

Once I had this first document -- a list of names -- it was relatively easy to confirm that these individuals had died at the BC penitentiary, and been buried at the cemetery (you can double check this information yourself, using the BC Archives' Vital Events Indexes -- all you need is a name, a date, or the city in which the person died to begin your search). Information from the Vital Events Index permitted me to access the death certificate for each man (these are available on microfilm in the History and Government Division of the Vancouver Public Library), which provided information including the date and cause of death, and the place of burial. Death certificates are the best independent proof available that the men on my list were buried in the BC Penitentiary cemetery.

Aside from death certificates, a number of other sources assisted me in corroborating the names corresponding to the prisoner numbers in the cemetery. The New Westminster Public Library maintains the Bowell Funeral Record Database -- S. Bowell & Sons funeral home was retained by the BC Penitentiary beginning in the late 1940s to prepare deceased inmates for burial, and records for some of the men buried during this period are available online. Since all inmate deaths in custody are automatically subject to a Coroner's inquest, transcripts of such inquests are also publicly available through the British Columbia Archives (see British Columbia Archives Research Guide to Coroner's Records). Finally, the National Archives of Canada maintains some BC Penitentiary records in their Burnaby location, however you have to be able to prove the individual in question has been dead for more than twenty years to gain access to such records.

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Are the men buried in the cemetery survived by family members?
It's likely that most of the men buried in the BC Penitentiary cemetery are survived by living family members -- including siblings, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and nieces and nephews. Since starting this website in 2003 I have heard from the survivors of seven of the men interred at the site. Sook Sias's (991) great-nephew, George Quocksister, lives in Campbell River, BC; Jim Tarasoff's (4214) granddaughter lives in Nelson, BC; George Sidney Williams's (5920) niece lives near Cobourg, ON and his great-niece near Guelph, ON; one of Don Bottineau's (9720) sons lives in New Westminster, BC, very close to the cemetery; Stephen Poole's descendants live in Fort Ware, BC; a schoolmate of Reginald Colpitts lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia; and Gordon Hawley's niece lives in Fort St. John, BC.

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Do you know the identity of every individual buried in the cemetery?
No. There are two men buried in the cemetery whose identity it has not yet been possible to determine. These are prisoner numbers 9391 and 9511 (according to a cemetery blueprint, the latter may have been named "Wickmann" or "Wichman"). From their prisoner numbers, it can be determined that these men were admitted to the BC Penitentiary between 1958 - 1959.

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Is the BC Penitentiary cemetery located near/in the same place as the Woodlands cemetery?
The two cemeteries are located very close to one another -- perhaps 500 meters apart -- but they are not one and the same place. The one-acre Woodlands cemetery, located at the northwest edge of the Woodlands property adjacent to Queen's Park Care Centre, was officially turned into a park in 1976 (see "Cemetery To Become a Royal City Park", The Columbian, November 2, 1976). 130 markers belonging to children and young people who died at Woodlands during the previous century had at that time already been removed -- illegally -- and were reportedly being used to line a path for a residence in Coquitlam. The Woodlands cemetery is all but invisible now, and its fate hangs in the balance given current development of the Woodlands site.

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Who owns the cemetery? Who is responsible for its upkeep?
The cemetery is owned by the City of New Westminster.

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Information about men buried in the BC Penitentiary cemetery

In terms of violent crime, only eight of the men buried in the cemetery were convicted of murder, an additional three of manslaughter, two more of attempted murder and one of "accessory after the fact" to murder. One of the men buried in the cemetery was serving time for common assault, and another for "causing the death of an unborn child". Three of the men buried in the cemetery were serving time for sex crimes -- one of these was for the victimless offence of "buggery".

Five of the men buried in the cemetery were serving time in the BC Penitentiary for public nudity -- all five of these were Doukhobors charged during 1930s protest marches in the Kootenay Valley.

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Are there any women buried in the BC Penitentiary cemetery?
Although there were a handful of women incarcerated in the BC Penitentiary during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there is no record of any having been buried in the cemetery.

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Were any of the men buried in the cemetery executed?

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Are there any First Nations or Aboriginal men buried in the cemetery?
Six of the men buried in the BC Penitentiary cemetery were status Indians (First Nations men who were, at the time of their deaths, registered as "Indians" under the Indian Act). These were Johnny Peter, a member of the Penelakut First Nation of Kuper Island, BC (for whom no headstone has been located); Moses Paul (1844) a member of High Bar First Nation located near Clinton, BC; John Baptiste (2679) of Arrow Park, West Kootenay, BC; Sook Sias (991) of Salmon River, BC; Stephen Poole (5603) of the former Fort Graham Band (now Kwadacha First Nation -- the Fort Graham Band's lands were flooded by BC Hydro in 1968 to create the Williston Reservoir); and George Wallace (6651) of the Soowahlie Band, Vedder Crossing, BC. A seventh man, Colin "Blackie" Gladue (8864), was said to be a "half breed", born in Tofield, Alberta.

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What nationality were the other men buried in the cemetery?

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How did the men buried in the BC Penitentiary cemetery die?

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History of the BC Penitentiary cemetery

The last burial at the BC Penitentiary cemetery was that of Harold Gordon McMaster (3237), on February 20, 1968.

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Where were BC Penitentiary inmates buried before 1912 and after 1968?
Prior to 1912/13, inmates who died at the BC Penitentiary and whose remains were not claimed by their families may have been buried in the "potters' field" at Eighth Street and Eighth Avenue in New Westminster (also known as the "Douglas Road" cemetery), now the site of New Westminster Secondary School. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this site was used by the "asylum" (Woodlands) and the provincial jail, and may well have been used by the penitentiary. (A section of the cemetery was also reserved for the burial of Chinese residents, and for "unknown dead" buried by the city.)

As early as 1904, the New Westminster Columbian was reporting that room was running out at the Douglas Road site ("Graves at a Premium", July 5, 1904), and by October 1912 -- when space there had become extremely scarce -- it was necessary to acquire a permit from the city sanitary inspector before arranging a burial at the site (see "Eighth Street Cemetery", the British Columbian, October 19, 1912). By 1913 the Douglas Road cemetery was no longer in use. October 1912 marks the first reference on a prisoner death certificate to "BC Penitentiary cemetery" (see previous question, above). It seems likely a decision was taken around this time to create an on-site cemetery for the penitentiary. For an interesting postscript on the Douglas Road cemetery, see this September 16, 2004 article in the Royal City Record.

Former BC Penitentiary employee A.E. (Tony) Martin suggests other penitentiary burials may have taken place at St. Peter's Catholic Cemetery, on Richmond Street in New Westminster (this cemetery is situated within blocks of the former penitentiary grounds). Former City of New Westminster Archivist Archie Miller also notes that "[r]esearch on other cemeteries in New Westminster has ... found references to burials related to the Penitentiary in Fraser Cemetery".

In July 1971, P.A. Faguy, Commissioner of the Canadian Penitentiary Service issued a directive to Regional Directors and Institutional Heads of penitentiaries across the country to the effect that "[t]he practice of burials in penitentiary cemeteries is to cease forthwith, and Institutional Heads are advised to purchase a number of plots in the nearest public cemetery to their institution for future use". The same memorandum directed that "cemeteries on penitentiary reserves shoudl be turned into Gardens of Remembrance and all tombstones removed".

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