A Maritime man and his wife have made it their mission to restore some of the forgotten cemeteries to make sure that old headstones are preserved as a monument to the past.
“Every stone tells a story,” said Jimmy Vandebrand of Sussex, N.B., who is known as the “Monument Man.”
The former New Brunswick miner with a big heart said he wants to restore dignity to the dead. After getting laid off when the potash mine in Sussex closed, Vandebrand decided it was finally time to set something right.
“I always seen a need to straighten cemetery stones and no one specialized at it so I designed and built my own piece of equipment especially for cemeteries,” Vandebrand said.
He and his wife, Donna, now work to restore broken and discoloured headstones that have not stood the test of time, the rural resting places for early settlers, some dating back to the 1700s.
Restoring the headstones of families whose descendants went on to shape Canada, he says, is his sign of respect.
“The oldest cemeteries are in Atlantic Canada. That is where people landed when they immigrated and then spread out across the country from here,” he said.
They are fore families, he says, who deserve to have their gravestones preserved in time.
“I meet people every other day who come to cemeteries to find out where they came from all over North America,” he said.
It is Donna Vandebrand’s job to carefully scrape off hundreds of years of mould and dirt from the memorials, bringing the names back into view.
“To bring them back it is almost like we are bringing you back — we didn’t forget about you,” she said.
The church committee at St. James Anglican Church in Long Reach, N.B., hired the couple to restore the cemetery.
“The work they are doing is just amazing. I can now reach the stones; they are upright. It just adds so much to our community,” parish member Barbara Meade said.
It’s not a career the couple expected to take on in their later years, but it’s one that feels so meaningful they even sleep on-site in a camper along with the dead until the job is complete.
“I am probably one of the few that is laid to rest in a cemetery but am still alive,” Jimmy Vandebrand said.
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