It’s early morning in the Victoria Lawn Cemetery in St. Catharines, Ont., – a sprawling graveyard established in 1856 that holds the remains of nearly 80,000 people – and Adam Montgomery and Alan Ernest think they’ve located a lost gravestone.
Ernest, a cemetery-restoration expert, probes the ground by gently pushing fibreglass skewers through the grass until he hits something hard.
“It’s a bit like an archaeological excavation,” he said, marking the outline of what he believes is the buried gravestone.
Montgomery and Ernest are part of the Salem Chapel Underground Railroad Cemetery project, which searches for the forgotten graves of former slaves who
