Author Jean Yves Pelletier in Notre Dame Cemetery earlier this summer.
A Centretown author has given new life to the dead in a published collection of biographies of notable people buried in the Notre Dame Cemetery.
Ottawa Notre Dame Cemetery details the lives of about 200 people interred in the cemetery, which is located at the intersection of St. Laurent Boulevard and Montreal Road.
Author Jean Yves Pelletier chronicles many well-known Ottawa residents from the 19th and 20th centuries.
“I wanted to bring these people back to life and make them known,” Pelletier says.
“Some of [them] are still known today, but others have been forgotten.”
Pelletier says he came up with the idea when he led an annual walking tour of the cemetery.
“From year to year, I would always notice a new monument or something I haven’t seen before,” he says.
“Doing more research on the cemetery itself, I discovered really quickly that there were no published articles or books on this cemetery.”
He says the most surprising find was the large number of Polish army officers and intellectuals buried in Notre Dame Cemetery.
He explains that many escaped Poland during the Second World War—first to Great Britain and eventually to Canada.
Polish government treasures, including paintings and jewellery, were hidden in Ottawa until 1961, when they were returned to Poland, Pelletier says.
He adds that Joseph Polkowski, the conservator of the art treasures, is also buried in the Notre Dame Cemetery.
Pelletier says some of the other notable people include Sir Wilfrid Laurier, prime minister of Canada from 1896-1911and Marius Barbeau, one of Canada’s first anthropologists.
An English translation of Pelletier’s book was produced by Robert Serré.
“It’s important, in Ottawa, to bridge what I call a certain gap between English and French people,” Serré says.
Since the book is about Catholics from many backgrounds buried in a major cemetery, he says it “deserves to be translated into English because the historians, librarians, and citizens should be interested in that.”
Serré researched local history for 12 years.
He helped Pelletier with fact-checking in addition to translating.
Pelletier compiled information from a variety of sources, including interviews, archives and libraries, though he was not granted access to the archives of the Archdiocese of Ottawa.
Benoît Bariteau, the archdiocese’s director of cemeteries, says it is against policy to open its archival holdings to the public.
“We have to protect the private lives of people,” he says.
“When someone dies from suicide, sexual transmitted diseases or things like that … we cannot allow people to get access to that kind of information.”
However, Pelletier says the policies seem to change with the archivist and, in the past, he has used the records.
“My fear now is that, let’s say in 10 years from now, a professional historian has access to these archives,” Pelletier says.
“They might see the book and … they’ll think ‘Pelletier didn’t do his work.’ ”
He says he would consider writing a supplement to the book in a historical journal if the archives’ records become available to the public.
Pelletier says feedback to the book has been very positive.
“We are quite happy with the book,” Bariteau says.
“It’s always something special when a book is written about a cemetery.”