• The office records
• The tombstones

To request information on your Montreal ancestors via e-mail go to the Mount Royal Cemetery Website.  Type in your request. Someone will get back to you in a few days.

The information sent to you will be extracted from the burial index cards. Earlier cards had very little information - usually just name, date of death, date of burial, age at death, place of birth (usually just the country), place of death, and sometimes the relationship to another person in the plot. The later cards quite often had name, relationship to someone else in the plot (i.e. son of, wife of), date of birth,  place of birth (gets more specific in later decades), date and place of death, last residence, occupation and occassionally cause of death.

This information is not on their computers. The staff must go to the indexes, find the person or plot number, and type the particulars from the cards to send to you. Having seen the cards I know this can be time consuming, particularily when dealing with difficult handwriting. Hence the $3 per name charge. To see examples of the cards click here.
 

THE TOMBSTONES
Tombstone inscriptions may have more information or less information than what's in the office records. Or it may differ! The information in the office records was usually submitted by grieving family members when making funeral arrangements. Tombstones were often inscribed at a later date when family members were calmer and were able to think more clearly about the details to be inscribed on the stone. But sometimes they were done much later when memories begin to fail. As with all genealogy research check more than one source.Some wonderful  information is  inscribed on many tombstones in Mount Royal Cemetery so a visit to the family plot (or a photo or transcription of the tombstone) is highly recommended.

If you're planning to visit Mount Royal cemetery (or plan to send someone to photograph your family plot) it's VERY important you get the PLOT number AND the SECTION number. For more info on this see Map of Mount Royal Cemetery.

Keep checking the cemetery photographs site to see if anyone is offering to photograph tombstones in Mount Royal Cemetery.

If anyone reading this wants to volunteer (for the price of film, processing and other costs such as gas or transit) we could get something going now. Please contact me at pattyb@idirect.com if you'd be willing to spend a few days wandering through this wonderful and historical cemetery with your camera and a pad of paper next summer.