The Grouard Community Club is set to unveil memorial honoring the 1425 individuals interred in Grouard Cemetery from 1873 and 2023.
The ceremony will take at 4:30 p.m. October 11,2025, the Grouard Cemetery followed by a Thanksgiving supper at 5:00 p.m at the Grouard Northland School.
Prompted by the 2021 discovery of unmarked graves at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, the Grouard Seniors initiated a four-year project to identify and commemorate those in their local cemetery.
Utilizing ground-penetrating radar—a technology that detects subsurface anomalies indicative of graves—they located 1,073 unmarked graves.
This effort ensures that new burials will not disturb existing ones.
The project involved clearing the cemetery of overgrowth, mapping 360 marked graves, and compiling a comprehensive list of all burials using church records, vital statistics, and community memory.
This information has been made accessible on findagrave.com for genealogical research.
Pearl Sandor, President of the Grouard Seniors Community Club, remarked, “It’s been decades that people have been coming from as far away as Edmonton to clean the cemetery and work towards memorializing our ancestors.”
The unveiling of the memorial marks the culmination of the Grouard Seniors’ dedicated efforts to honor and preserve the history of their community.
Keith Hopper, Trending 55
