Early cemeteries reveal a forest of upright memorial stones, dedicated to those who were loved, while more recent burial grounds may call for memorials flush with the ground and special areas for inurnment of cremated remains.

As B.C. Historical News indicated: "Custom points to an interesting aspect of the sociology of death. It would appear that even in death, people prefer to congregate with those whom they share a common bond. The bond varies. It seems to be religion in the case of the Jewish people; nationality among the Chinese, Japanese, Greeks and Russians; membership in a lodge such as the Masons, Oddfellows or Knights of Pythias; or a disaster in which all died together as in shipwrecks or fires; or service to one's country such as the Royal Canadian Legion and their Fields of Honour." And there are the unannounced and rejected. Those who lie in unmarked pauper's graves or the 45 murderers who paid the supreme penalty.

The City of Vancouver's oldest and most controversial burial ground is Deadman's Island, a 2.8- hectare stretch of land surveyed by the Royal Engineers in 1863 and today the location of HMCS Discovery. In The Stanley Park Explorer, historian Richard M. Steele writes that both natives and non-natives used the island to bury their dead. Much earlier the Musqueam and Squamish peoples used the branches of the island's massive trees for their ornately carved funeral boxes. On the ground, simpler wood-slab tombs protected the remains of others, moss-covered and half-hidden by the ferns and salal.

Steele says smallpox appeared in the area in 1888, and by April of that year quarantine regulations were in effect. The epidemic raged for two years and a number of victims were buried on Deadman's Island despite the 1887 opening of the Mountain View cemetery. The epidemic's casualties "joined the bodies of British seamen, infants and suicides interred there," Steele writes. "To this day they remain on Deadman's Island; despite later developments none of the dead was exhumed."

Illinois-born Frank W. Hart and wife Amelia, who had started a small furniture factory, opened the city's first undertaking establishment in 1886 on Cordova Street. Hart also opened the city's first opera house and built Hart's Arch to welcome the first Canadian Pacific Railway train on May 23, 1887. He was well connected at city hall, being a pal of Mayor M.A. Maclean, and with help from the latter, Mountain View Cemetery was surveyed in November 1886 and opened in 1887 with Caradoc Evans, an infant, the first occupant. Since that time more than 135,000 deceased have been interred in Vancouver's only official burial ground.

Mountain View's manicured lawns and gentle slopes of today are a far cry from the early days. The B.C. Historical News recalled the Masonic funeral for Alderman Joseph Humphries: "To make a grim business even grimmer, the route to the cemetery was a steep, corduroy road, built over swampy land. When it rained heavily, parts of the road were under water and the timbers of which it was made tended to drift apart. On the Humphries' occasion, everyone except the deceased had to get out and walk across the swamp. Even then, one of the horses slipped between two of the timbers, the wheels of the hearse did likewise and the vehicle became mired in mud."

Superintendent Wayne Smith says there are 90,000 graves, many at double depth to hold two deceased, and the cemetery is spread over 42.5 hectares west of Fraser between 31st and 41st avenues. As many as 13,000 veterans are buried there, including five or six winners of the Victoria Cross. The city stopped selling plots in 1986, although there are 3,600 graves that have been bought but never used. Interments for indigents are Mountain View's main business today, but the city was said to be considering leasing the site to a private operator to cut the cemetery's annual deficit of more than $600,000.

It's little known that Vancouver started a second burial ground in Burnaby, about 1.5 kilometres north of the Lougheed Highway in the 1930s, with the burial of eight indigents. They were quietly exhumed in the 1970s. The burial ground was closed.

The Pioneer Cemetery is adjacent to St, George's Anglican Church at Fort Langley. Most of those buried there were Hudson's Bay Company employees or early settlers. A tablet on a large stone reads: "Among the many pioneers of the Langley district who are buried here are: Ovid Allard 1817-1874 and William H. Newton 1833-1875. Two faithful servants of the Hudson's Bay Company at its Port Fort Langley." The wrought iron cross attached to the church's western gable memorializes a Hawaiian-born employee and formerly stood in the cemetery. The first burial in the Fort Langley Cemetery was in 1882, when Robert Mackie, father of the municipality's first reeve, died. The cemetery is noted for its wrought iron grave enclosures, impressive marble and granite monuments, and mature landscaping.

The Royal Engineers started cemeteries in New Westminster at the corner of Agnes and Dufferin and between 8th Avenue and 10th Avenue, but these gave way to the 8-hectare Fraser Cemetery, opened in 1870 at 100 Richmond Street, located on a hill facing east and overlooking the Fraser River. Here you will find the earthly remains of such notables as "Gassy Jack" Deighton of Gastown, riverboat Captain William Irving, Raymond Burr of Perry Mason fame, and politicians and businessmen of yesteryear. Here you will also find special sections for members of the Masonic Order, the Oddfellows and the Church of England.

St. Peter's Roman Catholic Cemetery in New Westminster, opened in 1880, covers slightly more than 2 hectares.

New Westminster's Jewish Schara Tzedeck Cemetery is located at 23rd Street and Marine Drive on the boundary of New Westminster and Burnaby. There are many Jewish cemeteries spotted throughout the Lower Mainland.

And what of British Columbia's luckless ones! Those whose lives ended when a scaffold door gave way! In his book Four Walls in the West--The Story of the B. C. Penitentiary, Jack David Scott says there was one hanging at this institution, built in 1878 and closed in 1980. Prisoner Joseph Smith killed guard J.H. Joynson in 1912 and was executed January 31, 1913. Smith, and others who died of natural causes while incarcerated, were buried in a small cemetery across the glen from the top of the prison. Earl Anderson, author of A Hard Place To Do Time--The Story of Okalla Prison, notes there were 44 hangings from the time the prison farm opened in 1912 to its close in 1991. Their remains would find a place in the pauper's section of Mountain View or Forest Lawn Cemetery, opened in 1924, or families would claim them.

"The Old Cemetery" on Lillooet Road in North Vancouver is located in a wilderness setting and was established in 1909 with the first interment in 1910. Its 9 hectares will allow for interments for years to come with more than 10,000 graves already in use.

West Vancouver's Capilano View Cemetery at 1490 3rd Street is another cemetery gem. Opened in the mid-1920s by the municipality, and with 7 of its 18 hectares fully developed, stone ruins have been used to form a columbarium wall with 502 rock and granite niches. Six satellite locations in a grove of mature trees offer the visitor a vista of great beauty.

Three corporations own four Greater Vancouver cemeteries. Service Corporation International (Canada) operates Forest Lawn Memorial Park and Ocean View Burial Park in Burnaby. Forest Lawn was started by Albert E Arnold in 1935 and is located at 3789 Royal Oak Avenue, while Ocean View primarily serves New Westminster and Vancouver's East End. Its location is 4000 Imperial Street, directly across from Burnaby's Central Park. Funeral homes occupy both sites, which were acquired by SCIC in 1969.

Spectacular, to say the least, is Ocean View's mausoleum, which underwent a $1.2 million addition in 1986. Perhaps one of Canada's largest mausoleums, it is adorned with a two-storey stained glass window and a marble statue carved from a single block weighing 2.5 tons and standing 183 centimetres high. There are approximately 4,500 entombments in the mausoleurn as well as a large number of inurnments. The cemetery has 86,000 interments, with 30 of its 36 hectares developed.

Valley View Memorial Gardens, opened in 1954 by Arbor Memorial Services, is at 14660 72nd Avenue in Surrey. It also has a funeral home on site.

Opened in the late 1950s, the I13.8-hectare Victory Memorial Park has been a landmark, with its big white cross, in the South Surrey-White Rock area for nearly 40 years. Victory was acquired in 1984 by The Loewen Group, now the second largest publicly owned funeral corporation in North America.

Newest cemetery in the Greater Vancouver district is at Whistler, opened in 1985 and comprising 1.3 hecatres, of which a fifth of a hectare has been developed for the community of 6,000. It's in a wood-like setting with a stream running by near Alta Lake Road on the west side of the resort municipality.

It is now 30 years since the Gardens of Gethsemani was opened by the Archdiocese of Vancouver. On May 10, 1965, work commenced on clearing a portion of a 23.4-hectare site in South Surrey. It was the first regional cemetery and mausoleum to serve the needs of Catholics and their families in the Lower Mainland. According to Rev. Msgr. Nunzio Defoe, executive director, there has been a recent addition of a second mausoleum with 190 crypts and 72 niches. There's also a full service Catholic chapel at Gethsemani.

There are other cemeteries just as important to their communities: Port Coquitlam at the top of Oxford Street, started in the 1950s; Surrey's municipally owned Hazelmere, Sunnyside Lawn and Surrey Centre; Maple Ridge's 6-hectare site at 21404 Dewdeny Trunk Road and the Burquitlam Municipal Cemetery, established in 1937.

All serve, and serve well. For as Longfellow wrote: "I like that ancient Saxon phrase, which calls the burial ground God's acre."