Lonely Graves 1837-2005

A lonely grave is a single grave or in a small group of graves outside a recognised or currently used cemetery that never had more than about twenty graves. This means that we find very isolated single burials through to the small collections at disused railway sidings, rural homesteads and long-forgotten chapel sites. Lonely, however, does not mean remote. Colonel William Light the founder of Adelaide is buried in a city square but his grave is lonely in the fact that it is outside a regular cemetery. Many sites have no headstone, some are no more than rumoured graves and others are well documented, but all have a story to be told. In the quest to document lonely graves, the task is twofold—the first is to locate and accurately describe the site and the second is to gather up the background information about the death and the biography of the person involved. Lonely graves are mentioned in a multitude of places and some of these are quite unexpected. Often reports of remote deaths only imply a remote burial, but given the era and geography, the burial must have been lonely. Where the compiler has been unable to confirm the location of these graves, they are entered into a supplementary index known as remote deaths.