Apart from the Geelong cemeteries, four cemeteries have served the local community since the 1860s. Today Grovedale and Mount Duneed cemeteries are managed by the Geelong Cemetery Trust. St David’s Freshwater Creek by the Lutheran Church and the Bellbrae Cemetery continues to be managed by a local trust which undertakes much of the maintenance and administration duties on a volunteer basis.
For many, the headstone is much more than just a burial marker but, also a way to ensure that a loved one is remembered for generations to come. However, headstones are often overlooked as tools in family history research.
Two of the challenges in our old cemeteries is that not all burial locations are marked, and some surviving headstones have eroded with time. However, the surviving headstones can be an incredible source of information—providing names, dates, places, relationships, and other key details that may fill in the gaps of your research. In some cases the headstones may provide surprising information not recorded anywhere else providing further clues for research.
The Geelong Advertiser, published on Trove has been used where possible to fill in some of the gaps of the headstones.
Finding out more
Our database of cemetery records is growing all the time. The date refers to both the monumental inscriptions we have collected and our database from burial registers and indexes.
Click on the map below to view the headstone at the cemetery.
Go to the name index to view the list of those buried at each cemetery. (still being developed)
Click on the settler’s name to go to their newspaper obituary at Trove
If you find a family member, feel free to leave a comment. It may lead you to others researching the same person.
