Baron de Hirsch de la Savane Cemeteries
Baron de Hirsch Memorial Park (Map: A1)


Section GPS 45.500772, -73.655075
Burials 2262
Data Credits Gary Perlman
Photos 2250
Photo Credits Gary Perlman
Updated 2017-06-06
Released in JOWBR 2021-01-21
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Subsets: New record - Obituary - Fallen stone - Hebrew name

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Montreal's Baron de Hirsch Cemetery dates back to the early 1900s and is still in active use. It incorporates over 100 cemetery sections and covers nearly 48 acres. It is located about five miles from downtown Montreal, just east of the juncture of the Decarie Expressway (Aut.15) and the TransCanada Highway (Aut.40).

Visit JGS-Montreal.org/bdh for information about the cemetery sections, burial records, photographs and more.

Additional information can be obtained from the Baron de Hirsch de la Savane Cemetery, 5015 rue de la Savane, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H4P 1V1 Tel: 514-735-4696, Fax 514-735-4698, Email: bdh@barondehirsch.com Website: BaronDeHirsch.com

Baron de Hirsch Memorial Park is a large section (Map: A1) next to the office. Deceptively, it looks like about 25 long rows, each with about 100 burials, but the layout is complicated. Each long row contains six or seven row numbers, and each row number spans two back-facing rows. As grave numbers within a numbered row increase, they go from an east-facing long row to a west-facing one. Married couples often have grave numbers that are three or four numbers apart. As rows filled up, extra grave numbers were added by appending letters. The complexity is why I often had a hard time finding burials, and why I decided to photograph the whole section.

Stats: The final submission has 2261 records (2216 old, 45 new) 2249 with photos. The most recent burial was: 2017-03-01. The earliest death is 1912-08-02 (with a newish stone), but the next oldest is 1928-08-12 (see list).

Corrections: This update includes the following changes/corrections, (not including added data or cases where the death date was moved to the burial date):

DeathAge: Some DeathAge values were apparently made by subtracting the BirthYear from the DeathYear, so many were off by one. Wrong ones were simply removed from the data; correct ones retained. If a stone showed an incorrect age, that age was retained.

Death/Burial Dates: There were few more than 1713 records indicating that DeathDate might be BurialDate (DDBD). After adding DeathDates from stones, and moving old DeathDates to BurialDate (if after DeathDate), 386 DDBD notices remained.

Flowers: The 1133 notes about flowers were removed because flowers might no longer be provided. The BdH office could be contacted for additional information regardless of whether flowers are provided.

Checking: The checking of the data produced 458 added or changed lines. Some changes were multiline changes, especially when the old value was retained for tracking corrections (~100), but most were single-letter or -number changes. A more detailed analysis is possible.

Schematic map (garage is gone): Except for the east-most row nearest Road A (bottom of map), each long horizontal row is made of two back-to-back rows of stones. Within a row number, adjacent graves do not necessarily have adjacent grave numbers; adjacent grave numbers might belong to stones facing away from each other. For example, 15:11 and 15:12 are adjacent grave numbers in Row 15, but they are back-to-back.

Time Spent: I did not keep close track of time, and I usually only worked for a few hours at a time, so these are rough estimates, but there are time stamps on the files so more accuracy is possible.

  1. Photos: 16 hours April 23-28. About 3500 photos were taken over four days of 3-5 hours each day. I'd photograph a headstone first and then any footstones. At the end of each long row, and at some paths, I took context photos showing anywhere from 3 to 20 headstones. The long lines in the BdH Memorial Park (A1) point very close to north, so east-facing lines were photographed in the mornings and west-facing lines in the afternoon. All were photographed before flowers were installed, and most before flower beds were prepared; both these make a mess of footstones and the bases of headstones.
  2. Photo Editing: 24 hours April 23-May 6. It look about 10 days to edit the photos at about two per minute. I used Click-2-Crop which makes it easy to make minute rotations before cropping. I purposely took photos at higher resolution so that I could take photos more quickly, with large margins.
  3. Date Entry: 40 hours May 7-18. I worked at about one record per minute. Some records took several minutes (e.g., adding obituary information, adding Holocaust memorial information). Even the easy records took longer than I expected because the record numbers jumped back and forth, but the cost of that was probably less than 5 hours.
  4. Checking: 20 hours May 18-21. Mind-numbing, but the number of changes was a motivator. I had missed birthdates, maiden names, spouse names, etc. Perhaps the checking would have found fewer problems if I had separated the two jobs of (1) associating photos with records and (2) entering data on the photos.
So, I count about 100 hours.