Smartphone app for burial look-ups in Mona Vale,  South Head General & Waverley cemeteries * 

Recently I have been going through my family history records and checking that I have documented sources for all records in my family tree. I was working my way through the records that I had for the various cemeteries in Sydney and when looking at my Bridgement and Gillham families I came across my notes for family members buried in Waverley Cemetery. As I had moved a few times, including overseas from Sydney to the Netherlands and later to Germany, a lot of my records had been in storage in Sydney for several years and I could not bring them all with me to Germany. A few years ago, whilst I was on a family visit in Sydney, I had to close down my storage container. I then had to digitise, as quickly as possible, my family history files, e.g. certificates (I kept the originals), my notes etc. As time was against me, I had no other option but to shred a lot of my notebooks and in doing so I lost many of my source documentation notes. Unfortunately, this was the case with Waverley Cemetery, I had only kept the burial plot details and my photographs of the Monumental inscriptions, that I had taken in the cemetery back in 1997. When I looked at my notes in the digitised files there was no copy of the notation as to how I had found those burial plots. My memory these days is vague, however, I think that I had contacted the cemetery office and obtained the details over the phone, although I may have also visited the office, which I had definitely done in the case of Rookwood Necropolis and Liverpool Cemeteries. So I needed something to try to reconstruct and verify my sources. When I started searching online for Waverley Cemetery, I found of course that I could call them, but there was a charge for any burial look-ups.

The Waverley Cemetery website also mentioned the iCemetery smartphone app. I had not come across this app before. Below you will find a series of screenshots of the app taken on my smartphone

This app enables the user to lookup burials in Mona Vale (New South Wales), South Head General (New South Wales), and Waverley (New South Wales) * as well as a limited number of cemeteries in Canada. iCemetery is a smartphone app available in the Google Play Store.

The interesting thing that I found was that I could confirm all the burials that I had in my notes, except one family member, Margaret Gillham (nee Malley/Melle) was recorded as being buried in a different section (12) of the Roman Catholic Cemetery, although her details were on the Monumental inscriptions and included in the photographs that I have for the other family members in the Roman Catholic Vault, section (10). I also found that there were more Gillham family members buried in various parts of Waverley Cemetery. Another thing I noticed was that for Margaret's grandson James Gillham, his record was missing, I then redid the search with the spelling Gilham and I found James Gilham.

Below, you will find the screenshots from when I did a search for the Gillham family members buried in Waverley Cemetery, including the details for Margaret Gillham. Note that for some burials it is also possible to find the location on a map and I believe if you use the app in the actual cemetery it will assist you in locating the burial site of your loved one, on a high-resolution map along with your current GPS location. Of course I could not try this from my current location.

© 2020 G J Mulholland