Not surprisingly, we have uncovered as many questions as answers in our short series on the village Alexanderwohl. We think we know where the school was located but do not know when it was built. Likewise, we are unsure when the church was built and cannot say with certainty to what extent it still stands. A similar story holds for Alexanderwohl’s cemeteries.
The 1874 map we showed in an earlier post identified two separate cemeteries: an old one (5) and a newer one (6) that we supposed was connected with the location of the church.
Rudy Friesen’s map of Alexanderwohl shows only one cemetery, and he locates it to the north, right between the belt of tree marked on this map as woodlot. Friesen also writes of Alexanderwohl, “Today there are only a few Mennonite buildings remaining and the cemetery no longer exists” (1996, 207). Recognizing that satellite imagery is no substitute for boots on the ground, let us see to what extent we can confirm or contradict Friesen’s conclusion.
Since we know the general locations of both cemeteries, we know roughly where they should be in the Google Earth images. The old cemetery, for example, should be immediately behind the belt of trees at the west (left) end of the main village (i.e., before the bend in the road). The photograph below is looking toward the north, so the cemetery should be in the lower left corner.
The area of lighter dirt south of the trees at the left edge of the photo is where we might expect to see the old cemetery. Even at close range, one sees no traces at all of a cemetery (see here; the link is to a Google Earth view, so it may be slow to load). No other spots in the area look promising either, so we are probably correct to conclude that the old cemetery, the one that presumably held the graves of Alexanderwohl’s earliest settlers—including Benjamin Heinrich Buller—has, as too often happens, been erased from the surface of the earth.
Presumably Friesen expects that the same fate befell the new cemetery (although he seemingly does not know that it was Alexanderwohl’s second cemetery). The photograph below appears to confirm his claim—if one is looking for the cemetery between the two rows of trees, or even a little farther south, where the map indicates it should be.
However, if one widens the view and takes a step back (here is a benefit of satellite photography), one can see what looks very much like a cemetery farther south than we expected.
An overhead closeup is even more convincing: this small area set within the field has every appearance of being a cemetery, perhaps the cemetery where the members of the Alexanderwohl church were laid to rest.
We cannot be certain of this identification, of course, but it is more likely than not that at least one of Alexanderwohl’s cemeteries survives. Although Benjamin Buller’s grave is almost assuredly lost with the others of the old cemetery, other members of our broader family were likely laid to rest and may well still remain in the cemetery pictured above.
Work Cited
Friesen, Rudy P., with Sergey Shmakin. 1996. Into the Past: Buildings of the Mennonite Commonwealth. Winnepeg: Raduga.
Since we know the general locations of both cemeteries, we know roughly where they should be in the Google Earth images. The old cemetery, for example, should be immediately behind the belt of trees at the west (left) end of the main village (i.e., before the bend in the road). The photograph below is looking toward the north, so the cemetery should be in the lower left corner.
The area of lighter dirt south of the trees at the left edge of the photo is where we might expect to see the old cemetery. Even at close range, one sees no traces at all of a cemetery (see here; the link is to a Google Earth view, so it may be slow to load). No other spots in the area look promising either, so we are probably correct to conclude that the old cemetery, the one that presumably held the graves of Alexanderwohl’s earliest settlers—including Benjamin Heinrich Buller—has, as too often happens, been erased from the surface of the earth.
Presumably Friesen expects that the same fate befell the new cemetery (although he seemingly does not know that it was Alexanderwohl’s second cemetery). The photograph below appears to confirm his claim—if one is looking for the cemetery between the two rows of trees, or even a little farther south, where the map indicates it should be.
However, if one widens the view and takes a step back (here is a benefit of satellite photography), one can see what looks very much like a cemetery farther south than we expected.
An overhead closeup is even more convincing: this small area set within the field has every appearance of being a cemetery, perhaps the cemetery where the members of the Alexanderwohl church were laid to rest.
We cannot be certain of this identification, of course, but it is more likely than not that at least one of Alexanderwohl’s cemeteries survives. Although Benjamin Buller’s grave is almost assuredly lost with the others of the old cemetery, other members of our broader family were likely laid to rest and may well still remain in the cemetery pictured above.
Work Cited
Friesen, Rudy P., with Sergey Shmakin. 1996. Into the Past: Buildings of the Mennonite Commonwealth. Winnepeg: Raduga.
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