John Smith (1800-1869) and Isabella Fenton (1816-1891)

 

I visited the graves of John & Isabella Smith in Ontario a few years back. They are my 4th greatgrandparents.  Their son George Smith (1846-1905) had a daughter Julia Isabelle Smith (1867-1936) who has a son Jay Barker (1894-1958) who had a son James Benjamin Barker (1914-1964) who had my father James Walter Barker (1936-1995.)

They are buried in the Selby Burying Ground in East Gwillimbury, Ontario about an hour north of Toronto. The Selby Burying Ground is on the west side of Leslie Street in East Gwillimbury, and is separate from the adjacent Weddel Family Plot. 

I overlayed the text of the stones onto these images because they are quite hard to read. In addition to being old and weathered, these stones have been moved from their original location and they are now lying down in a circle alongside the other headstones in Selby. This has unfortunately resulted in more erosion on the face of all of the stones, and some are almost unreadable. I wanted to make sure to preserve as much as I could of my gggggrandparents' stones. 

The land this sits on was given to John Weddel in 1809, who had immigrated to Canada via Pennsylvania in the early 1800s. This section of the burying ground is named after Thomas Selby, and Irish settler and veteran of the War of 1812 and both Thomas and his wife Sarah are buried here. 

It was in 1975 that the headstones of the Selby Burying Ground were gathered into this circular configuration in the center of the property, into these earth mound cairns, and a plaque was placed at the front of the property dedicating the cemetery to the pioneers of the area. This is said to be the oldest cemetery in the York Region of Ontario.  

I don't know why this was done, as it was not done in other cemeteries in the area.  The local historian was not certain either. So the remains of none of these people are necessarily under their specific tombstones. But they were all buried in that area, and their remains have likely long since returned to the earth.