projects

Stories Behind the Headstones

For many years, the society has conducted successful tours of the Lilydale Cemetery. Members have produced booklets and provided a fascinating insight into the families who called the Lilydale district home. The society has drawn on its own extensive archives and the copy of the Lilydale Burial Registered which the Lilydale Cemetery Trust allowed us to copy many years ago.

Stories Behind the Headstones is our extension of this work and is part of our drive to allow the wider public to learn more about the families and, where possible make their own contribution to the stories of their own ancestors.

This project generously funded by the Shire of Yarra Ranges Grants for Community: Arts & Heritage Development, lists alphabetically all the people buried at Lilydale Cemetery from its establishment in 1861 through to 1931 who have headstones.

With each headstone we have included:

  • an image of the headstone
  • the interment information as listed in the Burial Register.
  • the headstone’s inscription
  • links (if any), image details
  • Biography, obituary and/or burial notices if available.
  • references listing the source of the information so people can do their own further research.

Our job has not been to correct any inconsistences such as in spelling and information but rather record it as it is so checks can be made later – that is another project for the future. Often there were discrepancies between what is recorded on the headstone and that of the Burial Register but we have left both as recorded.

Where there have been more interments than shown on the headstone, we have included all interments as recorded in the Burial Register.
This project is still a work in progress and will be completed shortly by which time the stories behind the 400 plus headstones will be available on line.

Thanks

It is impossible to thank all the volunteers who tirelessly researched each family using all the resources we had available to us. For the volunteers there was a bonus for them in that they learned more about the depth of material the society holds and gained new skills such as searching the internet, Trove and other on line collections.

There is one group we have to specially thank and that is the Victorian Genealogical Society who so kindly did a special digital copy of their Lilydale Cemetery microfich. Being searchable it made our task so much easier as the volunteers will attest to.

Your help

The society invites everyone who has additional information about or photographs of the families in our headstones project to please contact us and we will add that information to the appropriate family.

We can be contacted at: [email protected] or use our enquiry form.

Access

To access the stories, simply click on the alphabetical links below.

a b c d e f g h i/j k l m mc no p/q r s t u/v w x/y/z

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