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Edition 7, Wednesday 28 February, 2024

Page 1

1909

VOL. 116

NO. 7

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WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 28, 2024

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PRICE $1.50 INC GST

Expo success

Clean up continues

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Phyllis and Peter McLennan are just weeks away from completing the Gravestone Project to honour those in unmarked graves at Ellesmere Cemetery.

Final touches ready for gravestone project BY RACHEL WILLIAMS A painstaking project to formally identify the bodies of 245 people buried at Scottsdale’s Ellesmere Cemetery is nearing completion, with the final plaques set to be laid in the next two months. Phyllis and Peter McLennan have been humbled by the four-year journey to recognise those in unmarked graves.

“We get a lot of satisfaction out of it,” Mrs McLennan said. “Especially with the babies – we have given a name to a dent in the ground,” Mr McLennan said. The babies he speaks of number 35 and were buried during 1865-1930 but any commemoration of them had long disappeared – until now. “They used to have wooden crosses

because it was so far from Launceston to get any masonry done, plus they were as poor as church mice and with all the blackberries that were there and the amount of times it had been burnt out over the years, plus cattle and horses had got in through the fences and it had just been decimated,” Mr McLennan said. “Three years ago we were up here visiting our relatives’ graves and we saw in the old

part there were so many unmarked graves – more unmarked than marked. “Leslie Cox over the fence, one of the original Coxs, had this hand drawn map which was a real help with working out who was buried where, but nothing was numbered and a lot of it was incorrect with dates of when they were buried not when they died. T STORY CONTINUES ON PAGE 4.


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